On 14 June, French scientists published an article on a potential new diagnostic tool for the differentiation between the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia and typical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
The team involved 22 people with the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (the most common form of frontotemporal neurodegeneration, often connected to changes in complex thinking, the personality and behaviour - all of which may reflect impairment in moral sentiment processing). In addition, they also included 15 participants with AD (that had positive markers for the condition within the liquid in their spinal cord) as well as 45 healthy individuals.
The researchers then explored the participants’ moral emotions with the “The Moral Emotions Assessment” – a list of short moral scenarios as well as “control” scenarios that don’t elicit a particular emotion. The participants were asked to read those scenarios aloud and to choose one of four answer choices to describe the emotion they would feel in the described situation (or indicate that the scenario was neutral).
The researchers reported that they found the assessment effective to differentiate between people with AD and people with the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia, noting that the latter were more impaired in emotion processing than people with AD and healthy controls.
https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad180991
