What is behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia?

Prof. Nick Fox gives an overview of frontotemporal dementia and Dr Jon Rohrer explains where the name for the syndrome came from, before introducing the behavioural variant.

Frontotemporal dementia includes a number of overlapping syndromes:

Behavioural variant FTD affects the very front part of the brain and involves a change in personality or the development of behavioural symptoms.

Primary progressive aphasias are forms of FTD in which the temporal lobes and language are most affected. A number of different types of language impairment are recognised as different forms of primary progressive aphasia:

• Semantic dementia
• Progressive non-fluent aphasia
• Logopenic aphasia

Most of this week focuses on the behavioural variant of FTD, but we also look at some of the language changes later on in the week.