bvFTD diagnosis and prognosis explained (sensitive)

Prof Nick Fox explains the crucial importance of learning about the patient’s history at the beginning of the investigation leading to diagnosis. He also addresses what can happen at later stages of the disease, and end of life issues.

Key questions include:
• Is this new?
• What has changed?
• Are they less empathetic?
• Are they doing things that aren’t appropriate?
• Has it been gradually progressive?
• When did it start?

We hear about how it can be very difficult to detect symptoms early on, and how routine examinations don’t tend to pick out the nuances of behavioural variant FTD, which might be investigated in a specialist clinic.

It’s this difficulty that led researchers at UCL to develop innovative ways of detecting changes in social behaviour, which we’ll learn about in the next step.