Frontotemporal dementia: Signs and Symptoms

welcome back hair blazer today I want to talk about frontotemporal dementia so in previous videos I have talked about vascular dementia Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia I'll be sure to link to those below but I've been getting some requests to do a video on frontotemporal dementia so that's what we're talking about today now before I get into all the specific details I just want to do a time out and do a quick reminder on what the difference is between dementia and Alzheimer's disease or frontal temporal dementia or Lewy body dementia or all those other types of dementia right I get a lot of confusion still with people saying I thought awesomer disease and dementia were the same I thought they were different what are all these terms let me just briefly recap so I the way that I typically describe this to kind of make it as easy to understand as possible is think of the word dementia as if you think of the word cancer when somebody says they have cancer you automatically know that something in their body is sick something is not right right they are sick but it doesn't tell you exactly what kind of sick it doesn't tell you what the cause of the sickness is is it lung cancer is it breast cancer is a skin cancer is it brain cancer right there's all kinds of different cancers the same thing is true for dementia when somebody says they have dementia or you hear the word dementia it means that their brain is not functioning the way it should for that person's age so their brain is basically sick but it doesn't tell you what's causing it what kind of specific illness so is it Lewy body dementia frontotemporal dementia vascular dementia Alzheimer's disease dementia due to parkinsonism dementia due to alcohol right like there's all kinds of specific types of dementia people use the word dementia and Alzheimer's disease interchangeably because Alzheimer's disease is the most popular type of dementia someone that's most researched but really what you you need to know is just when you hear the word dementia it means that somebody's having a lot of problems with their mind with their thinking to the point that it's impacting their daily life and that it's not normal for their age now in the beginning the different dimensions kind of can come on in different ways they kind of start to become present in different ways and different things caused them and they can kind of progress a little bit differently by the end like towards the end of the stage of dementia like maybe moderate to severe all of them to matches kind of start to look alike because the impairment is so great it started to affect so much of the brain that they all kind of look similar but in the beginning they can look quite different so let's get into frontal temporal dementia specifically how that looks what are the common symptoms that it has and like how does it come about so frontal temporal dementia basically affects the front and temporal parts of our brain so we have different front we have different lobes of our brains two of the brain lobes are the frontal lobes and the temporal lobes on the sides and when we talk about frontotemporal dementia it just means that these lobes on the brain they're shrinking they're struggling and frontal temporal dementia in particular tends to come on earlier than other types of dementia so we're talking about between the ages of 40 to 65 years old the symptoms start to come out and they start to progress now in the beginning the symptoms that tend to come out are more behavior changes and personality changes this is a dementia where a lot of times in the beginning when these changes first happen because the age is quite younger than other dementias and the behavior is so such a drastic change it's not unusual that these people tend to get diagnosed with a psychiatric condition before it's realized that they actually have dementia so some of the behavior and personality changes that happen can be kind of socially inappropriate behaviors like losing the filter like they forget what they are saying or they don't it's almost like they're saying rude and mean things in public without care about how that might impact the other person they might become like hyper sexual they might take off their clothes in public touch themselves in public they might just do things that you as a caregiver is gonna find embarrassing and difficult other behavior changes that are common are things like increased irritability lack of effect so this is where the person doesn't change their facial expressions or tone of voice depending on what they're saying or what's being said so like if somebody were to if we were to say something really sad or hurtful you know our facial expressions change a little bit our voice might get a little bit lower like the person with frontotemporal dementia sometimes it's just completely flat whether they're saying a dog licked their face today or somebody died it's kind of the same kind of effect also in this type of dementia people tend to have like this tendency to eat a whole lot or to put a lot of things in their mouth even things that are not edible it just might have this fixation with this oral fixation to put things in their mouth language is another category of symptom that is often happening in frontal temporal dementia so here the person might not be able to understand language completely they might have difficulty naming things they might have difficulty like constructing a sentence appropriately like they don't put the words in the right position so the behavior changes and the language changes are two of the common features now you can have those symptoms and other types of dementia as well so that's where it comes in where there's brain imaging happening where you can see the effect to the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain the age of onset you know younger kind of tips you off more than it might be this frontal temporal it tends to have kind of a slower gradual decline similar to Alzheimer's disease and this dementia often gets confused for Alzheimer's disease so the person with frontal temporal dementia especially in the early stages tends to have problems with kind of the behavior category in the language category but their memory isn't necessarily significantly impacted in the early stages so if you remember from my video on five surprising facts about dementia that maybe you didn't know you actually don't have to have memory impairment to have dementia that used to be a requirement years ago but now you just have to have several areas of impairment of the brain the brain is responsible for so many different activities and tasks and skills memory is just one of them and so for frontal temporal you can already see there's two areas the social functioning area and the behavior personality and the language area so those two areas alone are with the negative impact on daily functioning that's enough to lead to a dementia diagnosis so frontal temporal dementia in the beginning stages doesn't have that pronounced memory impairment that you might see in some of the other dementias this dementia tends to come on pretty gradually and slowly which is why some people don't get that official dementia diagnosis until they've probably had it for years it's the behavior and personality changes that start to maybe leave that person to get diagnosed with some sort of psychiatric condition before the dementia diagnosis happens just like with other dementia is the amount of time somebody can have it varies greatly from a couple of years to 20 years right there's all kinds of factors that go along with how long somebody lives with dementia and it's different for everybody from lifestyle to the help they have to the diet they have to the exercise they're able to do to other health conditions other medications whether or not they have other dementia on top of the frontal temporal dementia right because you can have more than one dementia at the same time so in terms of you know how long somebody lives with that disease it's very wide two years to 20 years now if your loved one has these really difficult behaviors be socially in a pro behaviors what you might want to consider doing because it's really hard for you the care glazier makes it really challenging to go out in public and you might get to the point where you don't want your loved one to go out in public anymore which might might then reduce their functioning even further so what you can do is you can create like a little business sized card or even a little bit bigger that just explains very clearly and simply my loved one has a brain condition that causes them to say and do things something times that are unexpected thank you for understanding right and on the backside you can write you know frontal temporal dementia or whatever you feel comfortable with it's different for everybody here's an example of a card that I made that you guys can use and tweak as you want for your own situation this way when you're out in public and let's say your loved one you and your loved one are out to eat and your loved one says something rude to the waiter or waitress you can easily just slip that card to the waiter and waitress let them know what's going on and in some ways that might lead to more compassion and understanding from that waiter or waitress if your loved one is about to get a haircut and says something or does something at least you can like just pass that to the person giving the haircut to let them know you know what's going on if anything it really just eases your discomfort and your maybe embarrassment of what your loved one might say or do in public now there is a lot of confusion rightly so about all the different kinds of dementia is what causes them for frontal temporal dementia it's really not clear with the cause what the etiology is but there's a lot of confusion about it what causes it can anything be done to slow it down can we reverse it what's with the medications there's a lot of questions about it and it's really confusing I have been reading a lot of books from specific researchers and scientists who have been studying dementia specifically Alzheimer's disease and what if anything can be done to help improve it so come in the new year I'm going to be sharing a lot of what I'm learning so that you can maybe start to apply some of those changes to your loved one and see if you start to see improvements the reason so as a little kind of let's see like a little preview of what's to come you know there are men vacations I did an interview with the pharmacist I'll link to that below all the different dimension medications but there is no cure right for dementia there is no really dementia medication that's going to truly slow down or stop the disease part of the reason is is because it's not just one thing that's causing the dementia in the first place and so part of what these researchers are finding is that there's a lot of different reasons that could cause somebody to have dementia and we can start to intervene in all these different areas to start to show some improvement so I am excited to bring that to you to share what I'm learning with you in that regard in hopes that maybe it would help some of your loved ones especially from there in the mild stages but what I'm really hoping is that it will help you and your health down the road because as you know I've talked about before simply being a dementia caregiver increases your risk of getting dementia yourself especially if you're a spouse if you're caring for a spouse with dementia you're six hundred times more greater chances of getting dementia and so I want to hopefully keep you guys as healthy as possible and prevent that from happening to you so I think what I'll talk about coming up in the future I hope can help your loved ones but I also think can help you kind of make some lifestyle changes to make sure you're on the right track so I'm excited to bring that to you as always care Blaser if you have any questions or comments that you want to see me address in a future video just like I answer the question about frontal temporal dementia today based on a couple comments I received all you have to do is leave them in a comment below any of my videos I do read all the comments even if I unfortunately can't respond personally to them all so in the meantime keep up the good work I hope that you guys are all doing well I'll be back next week [Music]

Channel: Dementia Careblazers

Views: 181,492

Keywords: dementia vs alzheimers, frontotemporal dementia, what's the difference between dementia and alzheimers, what is frontotemporal dementia, what are the different types of dementia, careblazers, dementia careblazers, symptoms of frontotemporal dementia, what are the different dementias, different types of dementia, natali edmonds, dementia and behavior change, dementia and personality, dementia and language changes, embarassing behavior and dementia

Id: oKurhSgchww

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 08 2019