MONDAY, Sept. 12 (HealthDay News) -- Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), a common cause of non-Alzheimer dementia, progresses to death more swiftly than Alzheimer's disease, a new study has found.
In the retrospective longitudinal study, E.D. Roberson of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues compared survival among 177 FTLD patients with that of 395 patients with Alzheimer's disease. The study is published in the Sept. 13 issue of Neurology.
The researchers found that patients with the frontotemporal dementia (FTD) subtype of FTLD progressed more quickly than Alzheimer's disease patients (median survival from symptom onset, 8.7 versus 11.8 years). Patients with the related conditions corticobasal degeneration and progressive supranuclear palsy have similarly reduced survival rates.
But patients with the semantic dementia subtype of FTLD survived significantly longer than those with FTD (11.9 years from symptom onset), and did not differ from Alzheimer's disease patients, the study found.
In other findings, coexisting amyotrophic lateral sclerosis significantly impaired FTLD survival, while the presence of tau-positive inclusions was associated with the slowest progression.
"Frontotemporal lobar degeneration progresses more rapidly than Alzheimer disease, and the fastest-progressing cases are those with the frontotemporal clinical subtype, coexisting motor neuron disease, or tau-negative neuropathology," the researchers conclude.
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