Emotion recognition of morphed facial expressions in presymptomatic and symptomatic frontotemporal dementia, and Alzheimer’s dementia

Journal of Neurology

Fecha de publicación: 29 de Julio de 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-020-10096-y

Autores: Lize C. Jiskoot, Jackie M. Poos, Manon E. Vollebergh, Sanne Franzen, Judy van Hemmen, Janne M. Papma, John C. van Swieten, Roy P. C. Kessels & Esther van den Berg 

Background

The emotion recognition task (ERT) was developed to overcome shortcomings of static emotion recognition paradigms, by identifying more subtle deficits in emotion recognition across different intensity levels. In this study, we used the ERT to investigate emotion recognition deficits across the frontotemporal (FTD) and Alzheimer’s Dementia (AD) spectrum.

Methods

With the ERT, we assessed the recognition of facial emotional expressions (anger-disgust-fear-happiness-sadness-surprise) across four intensities (40–60–80–100%) in patients with behavioural variant FTD (bvFTD; n = 32), and AD (n = 32), presymptomatic FTD mutation carriers (n = 47) and controls (n = 49). We examined group differences using multilevel linear regression with age, sex and education level as covariates, and performed post hoc analyses on presymptomatic (MAPT, GRN and C9orf72) mutation carriers. Classification abilities were investigated by means of logistic regression.