Prosocial deficits in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia relate to reward network atrophy.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Empathy and shared feelings of reward motivate individuals to share resources with others when material gain is not at stake. Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects emotion- and reward-relevant neural systems. Although there is diminished empathy and altered reward processing in bvFTD, how the disease impacts prosocial behavior is less well understood.

Methods

A total of 74 participants (20 bvFTD, 15 Alzheimer's disease [AD], and 39 healthy controls) participated in this study. Inspired by token-based paradigms from animal studies, we developed a novel task to measure prosocial giving (the "Giving Game"). On each trial of the Giving Game, participants decided how much money to offer to the experimenter, and

SUBMITTER: Sturm VE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5651391 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature