Dementia Japan 20: 1-9, 2006

Neuropathological characteristics of Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD)

Kenji Ikeda MD, PhD

Zikei Hospital/Zikei Institute of Psychiatry

    Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is characterized by primary degeneration in the anterior part of the brain. FTLD includes several pathological disease entities including Pick body disease, atypical Pick's disease, corticobasal degeneration and others, which can be easily distinguished according to diagnostic procedure. Most of them usually exhibit variation of atrophic brain regions in greater or lesser degree. This variation of atrophic brain region in each disease causes different clinical manifestations, even if it is the same disease entity. This is the reason why discrepancy between clinical diagnosis and pathological diagnosis occurs sometimes in FTLD. For reasonable clinical diagnosis, FTLD, separate from neuropathological diseases entity, deal with clinical symptom-complex, which consists of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) progressive nonfluent aphasia (PA) and semantic dementia (SD). Though FTD, PA and SD are the reflection of involved brain region and not depend on disease entities, SD seems to be consisted of considerably uniform clinico-pathological cases.

Address correspondence to Dr. Kenji Ikeda, Zikei Hospital (100-2, Urayasuhonmachi, Okayama-shi, Okayama 702-8508, Japan)