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Imaging Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration

  • Neuroimaging (DJ Brooks, Section Editor)
  • Published:
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Abstract

The term frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) refers to a group of neurodegenerative disorders that target the frontal and temporal lobes. It accounts for approximately 10 % of pathologically confirmed dementias but has been demonstrated to be as prevalent as Alzheimer’s disease in patients below the age of 65. The 3 major clinical syndromes associated with FTLD include behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, semantic and nonfluent variants of primary progressive aphasia. The more recently introduced term logopenic variant appears to represent an atypical form of Alzheimer’s disease in the majority of cases. The neuropathology underlying these clinical syndromes is very heterogeneous and does not correlate well with the clinical phenotype. This causes great difficulties in early and reliable diagnosis and treatment of FTLD. However, significant advances have been made in recent years via the application of magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography imaging methods as biomarkers. The current review aims to provide a synopsis on the value of magnetic resonance imaging-based and molecular imaging procedures in FTLD.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Hannah Lockau, MD for careful revision of the manuscript and Sue Permagne, MD, PHD for helpful comments.

Compliance with Ethics Guidelines

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Conflict of Interest

Janine Diehl-Schmid and Traugott Gruppe declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Oezguer A. Onur was supported by the Koeln Fortune Program / Faculty of Medicine, University of Cologne.

Jens Kuhn has occasionally received honoraria outside the submitted work from AstraZeneca, Lilly, Lundbeck Otsuka Pharma and Schwabe for lecturing at conferences and financial support to travel. He received financial support for IIT-studies from Medtronic Europe SARL (Meerbusch, Germany).

Alexander Drzezga reports consulting/speaker honoraria from GE Healthcare, AVID/Lilly, and Piramal, outside the submitted work.

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This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Technische Universität München, München, Germany

    Janine Diehl-Schmid

  2. Department of Neurology, University of Cologne, Köln, Germany

    Oezguer A. Onur

  3. Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-3), Research Center Jülich, Jülich, Germany

    Oezguer A. Onur

  4. Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Cologne, Köln, Germany

    Jens Kuhn

  5. Department of Nuclear Medicine, University of Cologne, Kerpener Str. 62, 50937, Köln, Germany

    Traugott Gruppe & Alexander Drzezga

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  1. Janine Diehl-Schmid
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Correspondence to Alexander Drzezga.

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All authors contributed equally.

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Diehl-Schmid, J., Onur, O.A., Kuhn, J. et al. Imaging Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration. Curr Neurol Neurosci Rep 14, 489 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11910-014-0489-x

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