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Published on: January 30, 2014
Relative preservation of facial expression recognition in posterior cortical atrophy
Peter S Pressman1, Kelly Gola2, Suzanne M Shdo2
1From the Department of Neurology, Division of Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychiatry (P.P., V.P.), University of Colorado, Denver; Memory and Aging Center (P.P., K.G., S.M.S., B.L.M., C.M., K.P.R.), University of California, San Francisco; and Stanford Neuroscience Health Center (C.F.), Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, CA. peter.pressman@UCDenver.edu.
Objective:
To compare recognition of facial expression (FE) vs recognition of facial identity (FI) in posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), with the hypothesis that FE recognition would be relatively preserved in PCA.
Methods:
In this observational study, FI and expression recognition tasks were performed by 194 participants in 4 groups, including 39 with Alzheimer disease (AD) (non-PCA), 49 with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), 15 with PCA, and 91 healthy controls. Between-group differences in test scores were compared.
Results:
Patients with PCA performed worse than healthy controls in FI and emotion recognition tasks (p < 0.001 for all). Patients with PCA also performed worse than AD and bvFTD groups in FI recognition, with no difference in FE recognition.
Conclusions:
Patients with PCA have relatively preserved FE recognition compared to FI recognition, as seen in affective blindsight.
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