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DEMENTIA OF FRONTAL LOBE TYPE1
Published: 1988;51:353–61
FRONTAL LOBE DEMENTIA AND MOTOR NEURON DISEASE2
Published: 1990;53:23–32
CLINICAL AND NEUROPATHOLOGICAL CRITERIA FOR FRONTO-TEMPORAL DEMENTIA3
Published: 1994;57:416–18
David Neary and Julie Snowden reflect on developments in the understanding of frontotemporal dementia and motor neuron disease since their publications two decades ago
At the beginning of the 1980s the establishment view in the English speaking world was that there were two primary causes of dementia: Alzheimer's disease and vascular disease. Pick's disease was an acknowledged pathological entity but considered sufficiently rare to have little clinical relevance for dementia patients presenting to neurology or psychiatry clinics. In any case it could not be distinguished from Alzheimer's disease in life. It was against this prevailing background that I set up our early onset dementia clinic with Julie Snowden as principal neuropsychologist. My early interest in cognitive neurology and dementia had been consolidated during a sabbatical in Boston in 1976, where I acquired an analytical approach to cognitive assessment and saw firsthand the value of the multidisciplinary clinic. In our own clinic, what rapidly became clear was that patients exhibited very different patterns of difficulty. Far from the ‘global impairment of intellect’ that had …
Footnotes
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Contributors DN and JS were both invited contributors, both conceptualised the article and contributed to its writing.
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Competing interests None.
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Provenance and peer review Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.