NEW YORK: While strong sucrose preference is a marker of frontotemporal dementia syndromes, hyperphagia is present in all patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia and semantic dementia is characterized by rigid eating behaviour, a study showed.
What’s more, dissociated neural networks appear to control this behaviour, said researchers. An increased caloric intake correlated with atrophy in the cingulate cortices, thalami, and cerebellum was observed on MRI in patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, and also involved the orbitofrontal cortices and nucleus accumbens in patients with semantic dementia, according to Rebekah M. Ahmed, MBBS, of Neuroscience Research Australia, Randwick, New South Wales, and colleagues. Marked hyperphagia was present exclusively in all patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, making it a valuable diagnostic marker.
“An understanding of the networks that control this eating behavior offers opportunities for targeted treatments that can modify eating behavior, metabolic abnormalities, and disease progression and provides insights into structures that control eating behavior in healthy individuals,” wrote the investigators.