Based on open access paper: https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance- ... 19/5895260Working with their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers at the University of Kentucky have found that they can differentiate between subtypes of dementia inducing brain disease. "For the first time we created criteria that could differentiate between frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and a common Alzheimer's 'mimic' called LATE disease,"
...
LATE is important because it affects millions of people, approximately 40% of people over the age of 85. ... Emerging research indicated that the protein TDP-43 contributed to that phenomenon.
...
"We used to think that aging-related memory and thinking decline meant one thing: a disease called Alzheimer's disease. Now we know that the disease we were calling Alzheimer's disease is actually many different conditions, often in combination.
Limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy differs from frontotemporal lobar degeneration
John L Robinson, Sílvia Porta, Filip G Garrett, Panpan Zhang, Sharon X Xie, EunRan Suh, Vivianna M Van Deerlin, Erin L Abner, Gregory A Jicha, Justin M Barber, Virginia M-Y Lee, Edward B Lee, John Q Trojanowski, Peter T Nelson.
Brain, 2020;
DOI: 10.1093/brain/awaa219
This seems to be a post-mortem differentiation. Hopefully it will eventually lead to pre-mortem diagnostic indicators and, someday, treatments.
