The INECO Frontal Screening tool differentiates behavioral variant - frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD) from major...

Executive dysfunction may result from prefrontal circuitry involvement occurring in both neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric disorders. Moreover, multiple neuropsychiatric conditions, may present with overlapping behavioral and cognitive symptoms, making differential diagnosis challenging, especially during earlier stages. In this sense, cognitive assessment may contribute to the differential diagnosis by providing an objective and quantifiable set of measures that has the potential to distinguish clinical conditions otherwise perceived in everyday clinical settings as quite similar.

The goal of this study was to investigate the utility of the INECO Frontal Screening (IFS) for differentiating bv-FTD patients from patients with Major Depression.

We studied 49 patients with bv-FTD diagnosis and 30 patients diagnosed with unipolar depression compared to a control group of 26 healthy controls using the INECO Frontal Screening (IFS), the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination-Revised (ACE-R).

Patient groups differed significantly on the motor inhibitory control (U=437.0, p<0.01), verbal working memory (U=298.0, p<0.001), spatial working memory (U=300.5, p<0.001), proverbs (U=341.5, p<0.001) and verbal inhibitory control (U=316.0, p<0.001) subtests, with bv-FTD patients scoring significantly lower than patients with depression.

Our results suggest the IFS can be considered a useful tool for detecting executive dysfunction in both depression and bv-FTD patients and, perhaps more importantly, that it has the potential to help differentiate these two conditions.