Can daily event narratives distinguish Alzheimer’s from frontotemporal dementia? A natural language processing study

LOPES DA CUNHA PAMELA; RUIZ FABIAN; FERRANTE FRANCO; STERPIN LUCAS; IBAÑEZ AGUSTIN; SLACHEVSKY ANDREA; MATALLANA DIANA; MARTINEZ ANGELA; HESSE EUGENIA; GARCIA ADOLFO

Congreso; 38th Annual Meeting of Argentine Society of Neuroscience; 2023

Argentine Society of Neuroscience

Dementia can disrupt how persons experience daily scenarios, affecting the representation of events and their own participation in them. In particular, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) seems to impact the recall and understanding of people and objects involved, while behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) seems to influence the perspective adopted by the subjects, often leading to a depersonalized viewpoint. As entities are manifested by nouns and perspective through the chosen grammatical person, AD and bvFTD might exhibit distinctive irregularities in their linguistic construal of daily events. However, no study has examined if such linguistic hallmarks differentiate these dementia types, let alone combining natural language processing tools with inferential and machine learning analyses. Here, persons with AD, bvFTD, and healthy controls (HCs), narrated their typical day. We used feature-extraction tools to quantify the nouns, verbs, first-person markers, and third-person markers. Our findings exhibited a specific impairment in noun retrieval for the AD population compared to HCs, while individuals with bvFTD tended to employ third-person references, emphasizing an exocentric perspective. Collective analysis of these features offered a reliable classification of patients within each group. Taken together, we underscore the potential of utilizing specific anomalies in daily narratives as a diagnostic clinical tool for distinguishing between AD and bvFTD.