Abstract
Background: Previous studies have suggested that Alzheimer's disease (AD) and semantic dementia (SD) are both associated with emotional processing impairment. However, the degree and type of emotional symptoms between the two types of dementia have not been previously compared.Method: We used the Apathy Evaluation Scale (AES), the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ), the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) and the Self-rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) to examine apathy, empathy, depression and anxiety, respectively.Results: Between mild AD and mild SD, moderate-to-severe AD and moderate-to-severe SD, the total scores of TEQ are significantly different, but the total scores of GDS, SAS and AES have no significant differences. In addition, normal individuals, AD and SD patients got the similar scores in SAS and GDS.Conclusions: Empathy emotion in SD patients is more severe than that in AD patients. However, apathy, depression and anxiety emotion is similar between the two groups.
Highlights
Semantic dementia (SD; known as semantic variant primary progressive aphasia) is one of the clinical variants of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), in which naming problems and singleword comprehension are both severely impaired due to asymmetric atrophy in the anterior temporal lobes [1]
Some studies suggest that emotional changes are accompanying symptoms of dementia, while others consider there is a link between emotional symptoms and dementia
This study focuses on the four emotional symptoms in Alzheimer disease (AD), SD and normal individuals, in order to provide better care advice to different dementia patients
Summary
Semantic dementia (SD; known as semantic variant primary progressive aphasia) is one of the clinical variants of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), in which naming problems and singleword comprehension are both severely impaired due to asymmetric atrophy (generally left greater than right) in the anterior temporal lobes [1]. Alzheimer disease (AD) is clinically characterized by prominent episodic memory disturbance affecting learning and retrieval of newly learnt information, accompanied by deficits in at least one other cognitive domain (ie, visuospatial, language, and executive functions) [2]. Emotional changes such as apathy, empathy, depression and anxiety are the most common symptoms in all-cause dementia and are strongly associated with increased caregiver burden and lower quality of life in people with dementia, but the relationship has yet to be determined. For CFT-copy, CFT-DR, BNT, SDMT and reading, significant differences existed in any two of the four groups
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