Beyond behavioral changes in semantic dementia: principal hurdles on the road to the clinic

Abstract

The neurology, psychiatry and psychology areas have played a fundamental role in the characterization of cognitive disturbances associated to dementia disorders, which has contributed to the improvement of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Semantic dementia is a subgenre of frontotemporal dementia, consists in a syndrome of primary progressive aphasia characterized by the loss of semantic knowledge, with the preservation of other cognitive functions, such as visual memory, visuospatial capacity, and executive abilities. Thus, the relevance of this study consists in thoroughly analyzing the main alterations in which concerns the behavior of semantic dementia, aiming to know more about this rare subtype of frontotemporal dementia, so that in the future its clinical manifestations, diagnosis and treatment are better elucidated. A narrative literature review was executed in the Medline database (PubMed), from 2010 to 2022, about behavioral alterations in semantic dementia. The present literature review article demonstrates the current comprehension about cognitive, behavioral, and functional alterations as a semantic dementia consequence, besides providing relevant information to prioritize the therapeutic offered to patients that have such a condition. Furthermore, more studies addressing this subject are paramount since the existing studies are still not sufficient to completely elucidate the behavioral changes in semantic dementia.