Right Limbic FDG-PET Hypometabolism Correlates with Emotion Recognition and Attribution in Probable Behavioral Variant of Frontotemporal Dementia Patients

PLoS One. 2015 Oct 29;10(10):e0141672. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0141672. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

The behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is a rare disease mainly affecting the social brain. FDG-PET fronto-temporal hypometabolism is a supportive feature for the diagnosis. It may also provide specific functional metabolic signatures for altered socio-emotional processing. In this study, we evaluated the emotion recognition and attribution deficits and FDG-PET cerebral metabolic patterns at the group and individual levels in a sample of sporadic bvFTD patients, exploring the cognitive-functional correlations. Seventeen probable mild bvFTD patients (10 male and 7 female; age 67.8±9.9) were administered standardized and validated version of social cognition tasks assessing the recognition of basic emotions and the attribution of emotions and intentions (i.e., Ekman 60-Faces test-Ek60F and Story-based Empathy task-SET). FDG-PET was analysed using an optimized voxel-based SPM method at the single-subject and group levels. Severe deficits of emotion recognition and processing characterized the bvFTD condition. At the group level, metabolic dysfunction in the right amygdala, temporal pole, and middle cingulate cortex was highly correlated to the emotional recognition and attribution performances. At the single-subject level, however, heterogeneous impairments of social cognition tasks emerged, and different metabolic patterns, involving limbic structures and prefrontal cortices, were also observed. The derangement of a right limbic network is associated with altered socio-emotional processing in bvFTD patients, but different hypometabolic FDG-PET patterns and heterogeneous performances on social tasks at an individual level exist.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Emotions*
  • Female
  • Fluorodeoxyglucose F18*
  • Frontotemporal Dementia / diagnosis
  • Frontotemporal Dementia / diagnostic imaging*
  • Frontotemporal Dementia / physiopathology*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Neuropsychological Tests
  • Positron-Emission Tomography*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Social Behavior*

Substances

  • Fluorodeoxyglucose F18

Grants and funding

This work supported by the MIUR grant “I meccanismi neurocognitivi alla base delle interazioni sociali” (PRIN2010XPMFW4_008) (SFC, AD, CC, CCr, and GL), and by the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca CARIPLO grant “Dottorato ad alta Formazione in Psicologia Sperimentale, Linguistica e Neuroscienze Cognitive” (AD). CC was funded by Fondazione Eli-Lilly (Eli-Lilly grant 2011 “Imaging of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in prodromal and presymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease phases”). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.