AbstractBackgroundFrontotemporal dementia (FTD) can present with changes in music appreciation. The aim of the present study was to determine the prevalence and nature of music appreciation phenotypes among FTD syndromes in a memory clinic population.MethodForty‐seven FTD patients (44.7% female, mean age 65.0±8.4, 31 behavioral variant FTD (bvFTD), 10 semantic dementia (SD), 6 progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA)) who consecutively visited our memory clinic were included in this study. Forty‐six caregivers (54.3% female, mean age 61.8±9.2) were included as a control group. Based on reported musical changes in the literature, we developed an informant‐based questionnaire by extending a previously used questionnaire (Fletcher et al., 2015). Music‐emotion recognition was assessed with a live music test in which both participants and caregivers were played 9 guitar chords, and rated if these were major, minor or dissonant (i.e. happy, sad or disharmonic). Visual emotion recognition was examined with the Ekman 60 faces test in a subgroup of patients (n= 23). Non‐parametric tests were used for group comparisons.ResultMusic appreciation phenotypes were observed in 79% of the FTD patients. Musicophilia was most often present (in 12/47 patients, 26%), followed by music anhedonia (23%), change of music taste (21%), increased singing (21%), sound‐aversion (19%), music‐aversion (13%), music agnosia (9%) and increased dancing (5%). Musicophilia was present in a third of bvFTD patients, but only in 10% of the semantic dementia and none of PNFA patients. The other reported music changes were more evenly distributed. The presence of music changes was not associated with lower performance on the music emotion recognition task (p = 0.62) or visual emotion recognition task (p = 0.87). However, compared to controls, bvFTD performed worse on the music emotion recognition task (p< .003), SD performed worse at trend level (p = .06) and no differences were found with PNFA (p = .8) patients (figure 1).ConclusionMusic appreciation phenotypes are highly prevalent in the FTD population, consist of a variety of symptoms, differ between syndromes and do not do not correlate with emotion recognizing capacities. Furthermore, compared to controls, bvFTD performed worse on a music emotion recognition test.