Frontotemporal dementia: we discovered a brain fold that may delay onset of symptoms

• Frontotemporal dementia is a rare disease – thought to account for only one in every 20 cases of dementia.
• People diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia usually die within eight years of their diagnosis.
• We discovered that the way your brain looks may determine your resilience to the condition.

Brain folds

• During pregnancy, as a foetus’s brain grows within the womb, it develops its distinctive folds while expanding within the skull.
• These brain folds play an important role in our later cognitive function.
• The folds that form early in foetal development are found in both sides of the brain in every person.

• Our team studied MRI brain images of 186 people who had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.
• Around 57% of participants had a paracingulate sulcus on the right side of their brain.
• We discovered that in participants who had this extra fold on the right side of their brain, their dementia symptoms began on average two and a half years later.

Cognitive reserve

• Brain reserve describes a structure in the brain which provides resilience to a disease before symptoms develop.
• After this critical point, people with high brain reserve decline rapidly – faster than people with low brain reserve.
• For example, high brain reserve explains why Alzheimer’s disease starts later in highly educated people – though the disease progresses faster for them when symptoms start.

Luke Harper receives funding from The Schörling foundation. and the Swedish federal government under the Avtal om Läkarutbildning och Forskning (ALF) agreement