This book describes Pick Disease, Diagnosis and Treatment and Related Diseases

Pick disease (PD) is a rare brain disorder that produces progressive and irreversible dementia.

This disease is featured by behavioral changes and language deficits with frontal and temporal cortical degeneration.

It is a heterogeneous disorder featuring a range of overlapping medical, genetic, and pathological causes leading to a single phenotypic expression of disease.

It is often a form of frontotemporal dementia and often happens in pre-senile patients.

If the person has dementia, the brain does not function normally.

As a result, the person may have difficulty with behavior, language, judgment, and memory.

Like patients with other types of dementia, the person may have drastic personality changes.

While Alzheimer’s disease can involve many different parts of the brain, Pick disease only affects the frontal and temporal lobes.

The brain’s frontal lobe regulates important aspects of everyday life such as planning, judgment, emotional control, behavior, inhibition, executive function, and multitasking.

The temporal lobe mainly involves language, together with emotional response and behavior.

Frontotemporal dementia is divided into:

Behavioral variant (bvFTD) and

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) subtypes.

PPA is further categorized as:

Non-fluent/agrammatic variant (nfvPPA),

Semantic variant (svPPA), and

Logopenic aphasia.

Motor neuron disease (FTD-MND),

Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP-S), and

Corticobasal syndrome (CBS)

Pick disease (a form of Frontotemporal dementia) is produced by abnormal quantities or types of nerve cell proteins or tau.

These proteins are present in all of the nerve cells.

Tau, transactive response DNA binding protein 43 (TDP-43), and RNA-binding protein fused in sarcoma (FUS) have been determined as the main proteins responsible for Pick disease.

These proteins often accumulate into spherical clumps, termed Pick bodies.

When they collect in nerve cells of the brain’s frontal and temporal lobe, they cause the cells to die.

This induces the brain tissue to atrophy (shrink), leading to the symptoms of dementia.

Doctors do no know what causes these abnormal proteins to develop.

Behavior and personality alterations are the most significant early symptoms in Pick’s disease.

Behavioral and emotional symptoms may be felt as:

Abrupt mood changes

Compulsive or inappropriate behavior

Depression-like symptoms, such as no interest in daily activities

Withdrawal from social interaction

Difficulty keeping a job

Poor social skills

Poor personal hygiene

Repetitive behavior

Language and neurological changes may be felt as:

Reduced writing or reading skills

Echoing, or repeating what has been said

Inability to speak, difficulty speaking, or trouble understanding speech

Shrinking vocabulary

Accelerated memory loss

Physical weakness

Pick disease can also happen at an earlier age (as young as 20 years old) than Alzheimer’s

Standard, structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and computed tomography (CT) scans can reveal typical atrophy of frontal and temporal lobe grey matter.

There is no known cure or treatment that can successfully reduce the progression of FTD.

The doctor can provide antidepressant and antipsychotic medicines to treat emotional and behavioral changes.

Physical therapy and exercise can reduce cognitive deterioration while speech therapy may relieve language deficits in patients with the primary progressive aphasia variants

TABLE OF CONTENT

Introduction

Chapter 1 Pick Disease

Chapter 2 Causes

Chapter 3 Symptoms

Chapter 4 Diagnosis

Chapter 5 Treatment

Chapter 6 Prognosis

Chapter 7 Dementia

Chapter 8 Alzheimer’s Disease

Epilogue