Semantic dementia

66 year old lady with history of bizarre behavior, memory impairment. Patients with semantic dementia typically present with a gradual worsening of both expressive and receptive language function. Patients complain of difficulty in remembering the names of places, people or objects or attributing the correct function to named objects 2-3. Speech fluency is typically preserved but associated anomia leads to the common clinical ascription of "fluent empty speech". Patients will often also exhibit dyslexia, dysgraphia and difficulty recognising faces or objects 2. Early on the deficits are largely isolated to temporal lobe function, and especially language. Later frontal symptoms also develop indistinguishable from the frontal variant of frontotemporal dementia, thus supporting the inclusion of semantic dementia as a frontotemporal lobar degeneration In contrast to Alzheimer's disease, episodic memory is usually unimpaired, with patients retaining a good memory of life events 2-