Primary empathy deficits in frontotemporal dementia

SANDRA BÁEZ; DAVID HUEPE; TERESA TORRALVA; NATALIA FIORENTINO; NORA VIGLIECCA; JEAN DECETY; FACUNDO MANES; AGUSTIN IBAÑEZ

Vancouver

Congreso; 9th International conference on frontotemporal dementias; 2014

Loss of empathy is an early central symptom and diagnostic criterion of the behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Although changes in empathy are evident and strongly affect the social functioning of bvFTD patients, few studies have directly investigated this issue by means of experimental paradigms. The current study assessed in thirty-seven bvFTD patients with early/mild stages of the disease and 30 healthy control participants multiple components of empathy (affective, cognitive and moral) using a task that involves the perception of intentional and accidental harm. We also explored whether the loss of empathy constitutes a primary deficit of bvFTD or whether it is explained by impairments in executive functions (EF) or other social cognition domains. Participants were also evaluated on emotion recognition, theory of mind (ToM), social norms knowledge and several EF domains. BvFTD patients presented deficits in affective, cognitive and moral components of empathy. However, empathic concern was the only aspect primarily affected in bvFTD that was neither related nor explained by deficits in EF or other social cognition domains. Deficits in the cognitive and moral aspects of empathy seem to depend on EF, emotion recognition and ToM. Our findings highlight the importance of using tasks depicting real-life social scenarios because of their greater sensitivity in the assessment of bvFTD. Moreover, our results contribute to the understanding of primary and intrinsic empathy deficits of bvFTD and have important theoretical and clinical implications (partially supported by grants CONICYT/FONDECYT Regular (1130920), PICT 2012-0412 and PICT 2012-1309, CONICET and INECO Foundation).