WASHINGTON, D.C.: Frontotemporal dementia presents a thorny thicket for researchers to pick their way through. Symptoms range from sluggish apathy to obsessive compulsion, and numerous genetic mutations and neuropathologies can underlie each person’s disease.
Variation in behavioural symptoms may be explained by degeneration of specific neural networks, according to a study published in the July 18 JAMA Neurology. Researchers led by Bruce Miller at the University of California, San Francisco, reported that some atypical social behaviours — including recklessness and failure to pick up on common social cues — correlated with specific patterns of neurodegeneration in two different neural networks in the brain, while other behaviors showed no such relation…