Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 10, 2025
A Behavioral Test Battery for the Repeated Assessment of Motor Skills, Mood, and Cognition in Mice
Published on: March 2, 2019
Psychiatric Screening Measures in Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia
Peter S Pressman1, Joie Molden1, Hal S Wortzel1
1Behavioral Neurology Section, Department of Neurology (Pressman, Wortzel, Woodcock, Filley, Arciniegas), and Department of Psychiatry (Wortzel, Filley, Arciniegas), University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora; Departments of Neurosurgery (Molden) and Psychiatry (Plys) and the Marcus Institute for Brain Health (Filley, Arciniegas), University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora; Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center for Suicide Prevention, Rocky Mountain Regional Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Aurora (Wortzel); Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Albuquerque (Arciniegas).
Objective:
Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is sometimes misdiagnosed as a primary psychiatric disorder, such as major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, an anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Nonspecialists often use screening measures for primary psychiatric disorders in early assessments of persons with bvFTD. The investigators aimed to evaluate the manifestations of bvFTD in surveys intended to screen for primary psychiatric disorders.
Methods:
Patients with bvFTD (N=27) presenting to an academic neurobehavior specialty clinic and their caregivers were provided questionnaire packets including the Mood Disorder Questionnaire (MDQ), the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale (GAD-7), the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale, version 1.1, the Ritvo Autism and Asperger Diagnostic Scale, and the Neuropsychiatric Inventory Questionnaire. Established cutoff scores suggesting the presence of a primary psychiatric disorder were used to define a "positive" response. Individual questions from each screening questionnaire were examined for a more granular characterization of bvFTD.
Results:
Overall, 15% of bvFTD patients screened positive for bipolar disorder, 54% screened positive for ADHD, and 89% screened positive for ASD. Hyperactivity or hypersensitivity symptoms were infrequently endorsed. In addition, 57% of respondents screened positive for depressive symptoms on the PHQ-9, and 43% screened positive for anxiety symptoms on the GAD-7.
Conclusions:
The use of cutoff scores on screening measures for primary psychiatric disorders resulted in potentially problematic positive screens of primary psychiatric disorders among persons with bvFTD. Identifying specific questions that distinguish between bvFTD and primary psychiatric disorders requires further study.
