Chapter 37 - Self-consciousness deficits in dementia

Abstract

This chapter presents an emergent neuroscience topic about self-consciousness (SC) in dementia. SC is the ability of subject to understand their own states of consciousness. There are very few works about self-consciousness in dementias, and the most are essentially about anosognosia. But SC is multifaceted. It is consciousness of one’s body, perceptions, history, identity, and projects. The studies considering different aspects of SC observe that the types of dementias heterogeneously affect those aspects of SC. Their results showed that the most frequent SC deficit in Alzheimer’s disease and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia is anosognosia but with more impairment in the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia. Patients with behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia showed greater deterioration of SC aspects related to frontal functions than those with Alzheimer disease, such as moral judgments or introspection. This suggests the involvement of the default mode network in SC.