TY  - JOUR
A1  - Frisch, Stefan
A1  - Dukart, Jürgen
A1  - Vogt, Barbara
A1  - Horstmann, Annette
A1  - Becker, Georg
A1  - Villringer, Arno
A1  - Barthel, Henryk
A1  - Sabri, Osama
A1  - Müller, Karsten
A1  - Schroeter, Matthias
T1  - Dissociating memory networks in early Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration - a combined study of hypometabolism and atrophy
T2  - PLoS One
N2  - Introduction: We aimed at dissociating the neural correlates of memory disorders in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD).
Methods: We included patients with AD (n = 19, 11 female, mean age 61 years) and FTLD (n = 11, 5 female, mean age 61 years) in early stages of their diseases. Memory performance was assessed by means of verbal and visual memory subtests from the Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS-R), including forgetting rates. Brain glucose utilization was measured by [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) and brain atrophy by voxel-based morphometry (VBM) of T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Using a whole brain approach, correlations between test performance and imaging data were computed separately in each dementia group, including a group of control subjects (n = 13, 6 female, mean age 54 years) in both analyses. The three groups did not differ with respect to education and gender.
Results: Patients in both dementia groups generally performed worse than controls, but AD and FTLD patients did not differ from each other in any of the test parameters. However, memory performance was associated with different brain regions in the patient groups, with respect to both hypometabolism and atrophy: Whereas in AD patients test performance was mainly correlated with changes in the parieto-mesial cortex, performance in FTLD patients was correlated with changes in frontal cortical as well as subcortical regions. There were practically no overlapping regions associated with memory disorders in AD and FTLD as revealed by a conjunction analysis.
Conclusion: Memory test performance may not distinguish between both dementia syndromes. In clinical practice, this may lead to misdiagnosis of FTLD patients with poor memory performance. Nevertheless, memory problems are associated with almost completely different neural correlates in both dementia syndromes. Obviously, memory functions are carried out by distributed networks which break down in brain degeneration.
Y1  - 2013
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/28900
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-289006
SN  - 1932-6203
N1  - Copyright: © 2013 Frisch et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
VL  - 8
IS  - (2): e55251
PB  - PLoS
CY  - Lawrence, Kan.
ER  -