Claire O'Connor

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a degenerative disease that causes changes to personality, behaviour, and language. A primarily younger-onset dementia (onset before 65 yrs), FTD also has a negative impact on a person’s everyday function, leading to difficulties with complex tasks such as shopping and paying bills, then progressing to difficulties with basic care tasks such as dressing and showering. This project will investigate whether these changes in behaviour and everyday function are related, will develop a novel tool to asses functioning of people in the severe stages of FTD, and will also investigate the benefit of an activity-based intervention for people with FTD living in the community with their carers. On a theoretical level, this project will contribute to the growing body of literature and knowledge in the field of FTD. On a practical level, it will lead to better care and support for people with FTD and their families.

Research into dementia primarily focuses on Alzheimer’s disease, with much less focus on other subtypes such as frontotemporal dementia (FTD), which is the second most common cause of young-onset dementia. FTD is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder comprised of three main clinical variants: behavioural variant primarily associated with progressive changes in personality and social function, and two language variants progressive non-fluent aphasia and semantic dementia. Within FTD research, there are gaps in the literature about longitudinal relationships between function and behaviour, and there is a distinct lack of knowledge about the severe-advanced stages of the disease. Despite the current lack of effective pharmacological interventions for FTD, there is a paucity of rigorous research into potential non-pharmacological interventions.

This project aims to understand how behavioural symptoms contribute to dysfunction in activities of daily living for people with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). This project aims to better understand the relationship between behaviour and everyday function for people with FTD, how behaviours and function vary between subtypes of FTD, and to explore a potential activity-based intervention approach that may ameliorate these symptoms or allow carers to better manage them. The longer-term aim is to provide information not yet addressed in FTD, from which to guide clinical management in the context of caring, and may lead to the development of future FTD-specific intervention approaches that could be tested in larger efficacy trials.

Project still in progress.