Background: Eating abnormalities are one of the core symptoms of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), especially for behavioral variant FTD (bvFTD), and semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA).
Methods: A group of FTD patients (43 bvFTD, 29 svPPA) underwent single-photon emission CT (SPECT) to measure the region cerebral blood flow (rCBF). The Cambridge Behavioral Inventory (CBI) was used to measure the eating abnormalities. A whole-brain voxel-based correlation between eating abnormalities and rCBF was investigated.
Results: In bvFTD, the sweet preference was correlated with decreased rCBF in the bilateral gyrus rectus and temporal pole, and eating the same food was correlated with the left ventral anterior cingulate cortex. In svPPA, decreased rCBF in the left inferior temporal gyrus was correlated with eating the same food.
Conclusions: These findings showed that either different symptoms in the same subtype or the same symptom in different subtypes of FTD may be correlated with different regions, indicating different neural mechanisms behind them.
Keywords: Eating abnormalities; Frontotemporal dementia; Regional cerebral blood flow; Single-photon emission CT; Voxel-based morphometry.