title: Confrontation naming and morphometric analyses of structural MRI in frontotemporal dementia.
abstract: We studied the neural basis for confrontation naming difficulty in 29 patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) by correlating naming with voxel-based morphometric analyses of gray matter volume in structural MRI. We found that naming is significantly impaired in FTD, including patients with semantic dementia (SD), progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), and nonaphasic patients (NON-APH) with a disorder of social and executive functioning. Significant cortical atrophy was found in the left anterior temporal cortex in all three FTD subgroups relative to healthy seniors. We also found significant cortical atrophy in unique anatomic distributions in each FTD subgroup. This included: lateral, ventral, and parahippocampal regions of the left temporal lobe in SD; inferior, orbital, dorsolateral, and premotor regions of the left frontal lobe in PNFA, and bilateral frontal regions in NON-APH. Direct correlations between confrontation naming and gray matter volume revealed distinct patterns in each FTD subgroup. SD patients showed a significant correlation in the left lateral temporal cortex, PNFA patients in several left frontal regions, and NON-APH patients in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest that confrontation naming is supported by a large-scale neural network, and that naming is compromised in FTD due to interruption of the network in several different ways.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Corey
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: McMillan
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gee
authors.forename: Peachie
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Moore
authors.forename: Kari
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Dennis
authors.forename: Chris
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: DeVita
authors.forename: Murray
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Grossman
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000849:Anomia / Q000209:etiology*; D018888:Aphasia, Primary Progressive / Q000209:etiology / Q000523:psychology; D001284:Atrophy; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000473:pathology; D003704:Dementia / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010487:Periaqueductal Gray / Q000473:pathology