Active clinical trials for "Frontotemporal Dementia"

This research is being done to develop a unique matching process for caregivers of persons living with dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease, Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal degeneration, or other dementia syndromes. Dementia caregivers often assume greater caregiving burden than do non-dementia caregivers, and the caregiving duration tends to be longer. Many caregivers do not have the adequate support they need. Peer-to-peer support has been shown to improve quality of life, increase use of services, improve caregiver health, and reduce hospitalizations in the person they are caring for. This study will assess a technology platform and matching process for the purpose of peer-to-peer emotional support aimed at improving overall wellbeing in dementia care partners/caregivers.

The objectives of the study are to; (1) estimate the change in disease -related cognitive decline over 1 year on a battery of cognitive tests administered to participants with early-stage symptomatic Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia (bvFTD) phenotypic variant; (2) identify the cognitive test or brief battery of cognitive tests which are the most sensitive to detect bvFTD progression; (3) determine the optimal schedule of administration of cognitive tests to detect bvFTD progression; (4) evaluate the relationship between cognitive tests and measures of behavior, function, caregiver's burden, quality of life (QOL); and (5) obtain blood samples for genetic and exploratory biomarkers correlations.

Apathy can be defined as a quantitative reduction of voluntary or goal-directed behavior. So, the investigators propose a behavioral approach for assessing apathy, to obtain a quantifiable and objective signature of reduced goal-directed behavior by directly observing a patient in a real-life situation. ECOCAPTURE consists of a multi-step scenario in a functional exploration platform equipped with data acquisition system based on video and sensors that track a participant's behavior. The primary objective of this trial is to create a diagnostic tool for apathy, based on the video and sensors metrics. A secondary objective of this trial is to validate a new experimental task (ICM_APATHY_TASKS) to test independently three main presumed mechanisms of apathy (motivation, cognitive inertia and coupling between motivation and action). Another secondary objective aims to specify the pathophysiological mechanisms of apathy, corresponding to cognitive and behavioral processes, neural bases and neurohormonal mechanisms. The definition of pathophysiological mechanisms will allow the classification of apathetic patients (or several forms of apathy) and indicate which mechanism (s) best explains the apathy in a given patient.

This is an observational study that aims to better understand the genetic causes of frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), Multiple Systems Atrophy (MSA), and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). It is hoped the information gathered in this study will help lead to better diagnostics and future treatments.

The goal of this study is to characterize tau kinetics and tau aggregation in the human CNS and to test the hypothesis that tau kinetics are altered (i.e. increased production, decreased clearance, and increased aggregation rate) in tauopathies.

People diagnosed with young onset dementia are today mostly assigned to the same healthcare services as people developing dementia at an older age. They and their families are however in a quite different life situation, which is likely to generate different challenges and specific needs for tailored healthcare services, of importance in maintaining their perceived quality of life. The investigators of this study wish to assess the factors influencing these families' quality of life, their specific needs and their use of healthcare services by the use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The main aim of this study is to provide better future healthcare services to these families, and to develop a programme for optimal collaboration between specialist healthcare services and the local dementia teams.

The purpose of this study is to assess the performance of AclarusDx™, an investigational blood test detecting gene expression information, and intended to help physicians in making an Alzheimer's Disease diagnosis in patients having memory impairments.

This study aims at exploring patients' ability to monitor their own memory performance depending on their primary deficit and the type of memory involved in the criterion task. The goal is to evaluate if semantic dementia (SD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) differently affect patients' awareness of their memory abilities.

Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD) is the neuropathological term for a collection of rare neurodegenerative diseases that correspond to four main overlapping clinical syndromes: frontotemporal dementia (FTD), primary progressive aphasia (PPA), corticobasal degeneration syndrome (CBS) and progressive supranuclear palsy syndrome (PSPS). The goal of this study is to build a FTLD clinical research consortium to support the development of FTLD therapies for new clinical trials. The consortium, referred to as Advancing Research and Treatment for Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (ARTFL), will be headquartered at UCSF and will partner with six patient advocacy groups to manage the consortium. Participants will be evaluated at 14 clinical sites throughout North America and a genetics core will genotype all individuals for FTLD associated genes.

Primary progressive aphasias (PPA) represent a challenging group of degenerative language diseases that has led to growing interest in the scientific and medical community. However, a full-blown cognitive/linguistic, anatomic and biologic characterization of the three main variants remains incomplete given that the available data derive from relatively small patient samples. Such a three-fold characterisation will be an major milestone with the prospective of providing the rationale for therapeutic interventions comprising specific rehabilitations protocols and pharmacological trials. The present study addresses theses issues in the three PPA main variants through a cross-sectional and longitudinal investigation exploring 1) cognitive/linguistic features, 2) anatomic/metabolic specifications (MRI-VBM, MRI-fiber tracking, functional connectivity - MRI resting state, PET), and 3) biologic aspects (CSF biomarkers, genetic screening).