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My wife was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 2012 at the age of 61 after exhibiting increasingly severe symptoms over a 3 year period prior to diagnosis.  Her condition has deteriorated month by month until she required 24 hour nursing care and had to enter a Nursing Home in April this year.

FTD is one of the less common forms of dementia.  The term covers a range of specific conditions.  It is sometimes called Pick's disease or frontal lobe dementia.  FTD occurs much less often than other forms of dementia (such as Alzheimer's disease or vascular dementia).  However, it is a significant cause of dementia in younger people (under the age of 65).  FTD is probably the third most common cause for people in this age group.  It affects men and women about equally.  FTD is most often diagnosed between the ages of 45 and 65, but it can also affect younger or older people.  This is considerably younger than the age at which people are most often diagnosed with the more common types of dementia such as Alzheimer's disease.

In FTD, a variety of symptoms are caused by damage to different areas of the frontal and temporal lobes. Based on these symptoms and the lobes that are affected, a person may have one of three types of frontotemporal dementia: behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia; progressive non-fluent aphasia; or, semantic dementia.

As with most forms of dementia, the initial symptoms can be very subtle, but they slowly get worse as the disease progresses over several years.  The rate of progression of FTD dementia varies greatly, from less than two years to 10 years or more.  Research shows that on average, people live for about eight years after the start of symptoms.

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