Clinical, neuroimaging, and neuropathological characterization of a patient with Alzheimer’s disease syndrome due to Pick’s pathology

ABSTRACT

The most common neurodegenerative syndrome associated with Pick’s disease pathology (PiD) is behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), which features profound social behavioral changes. Rarely, PiD can manifest as an Alzheimer’s disease (AD)-type dementia with early memory impairment. We describe a patient with AD-type dementia and pure PiD pathology who showed slowly progressive memory impairment, early social changes, and paucity of motor symptoms. Atrophy and PiD were found mainly in frontotemporal regions underlying social behavior. This report may help predict the pathology of patients with atypical AD, which will ultimately be critical for enrolling suitable subjects into disease-modifying clinical trials.

KEYWORDS:

• Alzheimer’s disease
• Pick’s disease
• frontotemporal lobar degeneration
• memory
• social functioning

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by institutional NIH grants [P01AG019724, P50AG023501]; LTG is supported by the NIH [K24AG053435] and GT is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [P300P1_177667].