NCT01147679

Study of Social Behavior and Emotion in Frontotemporal Dementia, Alzheimer's Disease and Controls

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 99 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of California, Los Angeles · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 40 Years – 75 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This study is designed to document the loss of sociomoral emotions (like empathy, guilt, and embarrassment) in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. The loss of these emotions, which function as the motivators for social behavior, will manifest in specific interpersonal behaviors. These behaviors will correlate with regional changes in regional changes in medial frontal and anterior temporal lobes. These social and emotional changes will be compared with a young-onset Alzheimer's disease comparison group.

Detailed description

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a devastating disorder and one the most common neurodegenerative diseases in middle age. The most prominent early manifestations of bvFTD ("behavior variant" FTD) are not the memory and other cognitive deficits typical of Alzheimer's disease (AD) but, rather, disturbance in social or interpersonal behavior. A basic manifestation of this disorder is a disturbance in the emotions and motives that drive social and moral behavior. In fact, bvFTD is an incredible window to the neuroscience of social behavior. This study will help clarify the neurobiological substrates of sociomoral emotions and their associated clinical features. The findings of this proposal can have major implications for understanding the interaction between brain and social behavior and for designing future research on the basic mechanisms of social neuroscience. This research aims to document the loss of sociomoral emotions (SME) compared to primary emotions in patients with bvFTD vs. patients with AD and normal controls. We need to show that these findings are specific to bvFTD and not present in Alzheimer's disease or normal controls. The project consists of three integrated parts: 1) behavioral measures that include observations in naturalistic settings, behavioral experiments, and behavioral scales; 2) psychophysiological reactivity (i.e., measures of heart rate, blood pressure changes, galvanic skin response, facial electromyography, and facial temperature) to social and emotional stimuli; and 3) brain localization of changes in sociomoral emotions with magnetic resonance imaging technology.

Conditions

• Frontotemporal Dementia
• Frontotemporal Degeneration
• Alzheimer's Disease
• Social Behavior

Timeline

• Start date: 2010-01-01
• Primary completion: 2013-09-01
• Completion: 2014-07-01
• First posted: 2010-06-22
• Last updated: 2011-10-28

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States