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Published on: December 18, 2016
Social cognition across bipolar disorder and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia: an exploratory study
Izabela Guimarães Barbosa1, Flávia da Mata Chiácchio Leite2, Maxime Bertoux3
1Departamento de Saúde Mental, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Neurociências, UFMG, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil.
Objectives:
Bipolar disorder type 1 (BD1) and behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) share similar behavioral and cognitive symptoms, rendering the differential diagnosis between them a clinical challenge. We investigated the accuracy of social cognition (SC) measures to differentiate bvFTD from BD.
Methods:
We included three groups of participants: early-onset BD1 (in remission, n=20), bvFTD (n=18), and cognitively healthy controls (HC) (n=40), matched for age, schooling, and sex. All participants underwent cognitive assessment, including the Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) and Modified Faux-Pas (mFP) tests, which assess mentalizing.
Results:
Compared to HC, BD1 and bvFTD patients underperformed on both SC measures. BD1 and bvFTD did not differ regarding FER or mFP total scores, although patients with bvFTD had significantly higher difficulties than those in the BD1 group to detect social faux-pas (p < 0.001, d = 1.35).
Conclusion:
BD1 and bvFTD share deficits in the core SC functions. These findings should be considered in the development of tasks aiming to improve clinical differentiation between the two disorders.
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