Affiliations: [a] Department of Psychobiology, Neuroscience Institute of Castilla-León, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
| [b] Department of Neurology, Faculty of Medicine, University Hospital, CHU La Milétrie, Poitiers, France
| [c] Department of Methodology of Behaviour Sciences, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
Correspondence:
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Correspondence to: Prof. Eva Ma Arroyo-Anlló, Department of Psychobiology, University of Salamanca, 37007 Salamanca, Spain. Tel.: +34 629460944; E-mail: anlloa@usal.es.
Abstract: Self-consciousness (SC) is multifaceted and considered to be the consciousness of one’s own mental states. The main aim of this paper is to compare SC in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Three groups (control and patient groups) of 23 subjects each were assessed using an SC questionnaire. Both types of dementia clearly induce an alteration of SC. The bvFTD group showed a greater impairment in SC than the AD and control groups. The SC score was strongly associated with frontal functions. The most significantly impaired SC aspects in the bvFTD group were Anosognosia, Introspection, and Moral Judgments. For the AD group, the significantly impaired aspects of SC were Anosognosia and Prospective Memory. The differences in SC between the AD and bvFTD groups were essentially centered on the Anosognosia, Moral Judgments, and Introspection aspects, which were highly impaired in the bvFTD patients. This suggests that SC is related to orbito-frontal functioning and thus, to the default mode network.
