Quantitative EEG in frontotemporal dementia

Accurate diagnosis of the major degenerative dementias continues to be problematic. Although diagnostic precision for Alzheimer's disease (AD) approaches 90%, for Frontotemporal dementias (FTD) it has been less than 20%. Previous work has shown that AD patients have both focal and generalized slowing, while in FTD the EEG is normal. We studied 26AD,13FTD and 27 health control subjects with Quantitative Electroencephalography (QEEG). Using only five QEEG measures with stepwise discriminant function analysis, we distinguished the AD from FTD groups each with 84.6% accuracy, and controls (100%) from FTD groups (84.6%) with high accuracy. The most informative QEEG variables for distinguishing FTD and AD were relative power from the temporal region in beta-2 band, and from the parietal region in the theta and alpha and beta-2 bands. These results suggest that QEEG may be helpful in distinguishing subjects with AD from subjects with FTD.