RESEARCH ARTICLE Right Limbic FDG-PET Hypometabolism Correlates with Emotion Recognition and Attribution in Probable Behavioral Variant of

The behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is a rare disease mainly affect-ing the social brain. FDG-PET fronto-temporal hypometabolism is a supportive feature for the diagnosis. It may also provide specific functional metabolic signatures for altered socio-emotional processing. In this study, we evaluated the emotion recognition and attribution deficits and FDG-PET cerebral metabolic patterns at the group and individual levels in a sample of sporadic bvFTD patients, exploring the cognitive-functional correlations. Seven-teen probable mild bvFTD patients (10 male and 7 female; age 67.8±9.9) were administered standardized and validated version of social cognition tasks assessing the recognition of basic emotions and the attribution of emotions and intentions (i.e., Ekman 60-Faces test-Ek60F and Story-based Empathy task-SET). FDG-PET was analysed using an optimized voxel-based SPMmethod at the single-subject and group levels. Severe deficits of emotion recognition and processing characterized the bvFTD condition. At the group level, meta-bolic dysfunction in the right amygdala, temporal pole, and middle cingulate cortex was highly correlated to the emotional recognition and attribution performances. At the single