Summary

• Study director: Katherine Rankin, PhD [1]
• Sponsor: National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Institute on Aging (NIA)
• Recruiting?: Yes
• Official study title: Measuring Altered Social Behavior in Neurodegenerative Disease
• Conditions studied: Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) [2], Alzheimer's disease (AD) [3], semantic dementia (SD) [4], progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) [5], corticobasal degeneration (CBD) [6], dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) [7], progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) [8] and cerebrovascular disease (VaD) [9].
• Purpose: The purpose of this study is to adapt measures of social and emotional cognition for valid use in neurodegenerative disease patients. The resulting battery of tests will be used to identify characteristic patterns of altered social functioning in different neurodegenerative diseases, measure specific symptoms found to improve early diagnosis of these disorders, and improve our knowledge of normal social and emotional cognition in healthy older adults. This project also aims to link any findings with structural neuroanatomy to improve our understanding of the neurologic foundations for social and emotional behavior.