After scanning the brains of people with three distinct types of frontotemporal dementia, researchers have concluded that inflammation in the brain plays a key role in all of these neurodegenerative conditions. This information could help experts think of new therapeutic strategies going forward.
Frontotemporal dementia is an umbrella term that refers to different types of dementia that affect the frontal or temporal lobes of the brain.
The hallmark of frontotemporal dementia is a severe impairment of cognitive functioning. Depending on the affected part of the brain, this may involve personality changes, difficulties in understanding language, or memory loss. Dementia is currently incurable.
Researchers are constantly striving to understand more about the mechanisms that contribute to degeneration in these and other forms of dementia.
The findings of a new study from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom now indicate that neuroinflammation (inflammation of the brain) is an important contributing factor to three different types of frontotemporal dementia. This fact may imply that it also contributes to many other neurodegenerative diseases.
The research, the findings of which appear in Brain: A Journal of Neurology, involved 31 people with frontotemporal dementia, 10 of whom had the behavioral variant of the condition, 11 the semantic variant, and 10 the nonfluent variant.
The investigators compared the results that they obtained for these participants with those of a group of healthy control participants. In doing this, they hoped to pinpoint the characteristi