ABSTRACT
Clinical understanding of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) has improved immensely over recent decades. For instance, the entry in the 1983 edition of the Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry for Pick’s Disease, one of the major pathologies underpinning FTD, stated, ‘ere are no specic clinical features to separate Pick’s disease from Alzheimer’s, and the distinction is generally made at autopsy not in life’. In contrast to what is now known, this statement could barely be further from the truth but highlights that if one applies the simplistic algorithm of noting progressive decline; falling below a cut-o on some global measure of cognition and excluding non-degenerative pathologies with a brain scan, then all degenerative dementias can seem similar.
