Regional brain abnormalities in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia: a meta-analysis

INTRODUCTION: Numerous studies have reported brain alterations in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). However, they pointed to inconsistent findings. METHODS: We used a meta-analytic approach to identify the convergent structural and functional brain abnormalities in bvFTD. Following the best-practice neuroimaging meta-analysis guidelines, we searched PubMed and Embase databases and performed reference tracking. Then, the coordinates of group comparisons between bvFTD and controls from 73 studies were extracted and tested for convergence using activation likelihood estimation. RESULTS: We identified convergent abnormalities in the anterior cingulate cortices, anterior insula, amygdala, paracingulate, striatum, and hippocampus. Task-based and resting-state functional connectivity pointed to the joint networks that are connected to the obtained consistent regions. Functional decoding analyses suggested associated dysfunction of emotional processing, interoception, reward processing, higher-order cognitive functions, olfactory and gustatory perceptions in bvFTD.DISCUSSION: Our findings highlighted a key role of the salience network and subcortical regions in the pathophysiology of bvFTD.