Neuropsychology

Patients with bvFTD tend to show executive function and working memory impairments. Unlike AD, memory and visuospatial skills are relatively spared. Patients may have difficulty with set shifting, concept formation, abstraction and reasoning, inhibition of over-learned responses, response generation, organization, planning, self-monitoring and using feedback to guide behavior.

While bvFTD patients tend to score well on the Mini Mental State Exam (MMSE), SD patients score lower due to their language difficulties. Despite these language problems, episodic memory for recent events is relatively spared. As the disease progresses, SD patients perform progressively worse on category fluency tests (i.e. the number of animals or musical instruments generated in one minute), picture naming (Boston Naming Test) and generating verbal definitions of words and pictures. Many SD patients also have concomitant dyslexia. Nonverbal testing of semantic memory may provide better results.

Like patients with bvFTD, PNFA patients tend to show executive function and working memory deficits while episodic memory, semantic memory and visuospatial function are preserved. Unlike bvFTD, PNFA causes specific language difficulties including agrammatism, phonemic paraphasias, anomia, stuttering, impaired repetition, apraxia of speech, alexia and agraphia.