AUTHOR=Nigro Salvatore , Filardi Marco , Tafuri Benedetta , De Blasi Roberto , Cedola Alessia , Gigli Giuseppe , Logroscino Giancarlo 

TITLE=The Role of Graph Theory in Evaluating Brain Network Alterations in Frontotemporal Dementia

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neurology

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurology/articles/10.3389/fneur.2022.910054

DOI=10.3389/fneur.2022.910054

ISSN=1664-2295

ABSTRACT=Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a spectrum of clinical syndromes that affects personality, behavior, language, and cognition. The current diagnostic criteria recognize three main clinical subtypes: behavioral variant of FTD (bvFTD), semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and non-fluent/agrammatic variant of PPA (nfvPPA). FTD patients display heterogeneous clinical and neuropsychological features that highly overlap with those presented by psychiatric syndromes and other types of dementia, moreover up to now there are no reliable disease biomarkers, which makes the diagnosis of FTD particularly challenging.
To overcome this issue different studies have adopted metrics derived from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to characterize structural and functional brain abnormalities. Within this field, a growing body of scientific literature has shown that graph theory analysis applied to MRI data displays unique potentialities in unveiling brain network abnormalities of FTD subtypes. Here we provide a critical overview of studies that adopted graph theory to examine topological changes of large-scale brain networks in FTD. Moreover, we also discuss the possible role of information arising from brain network organization in the diagnostic algorithm of FTD-spectrum disorders and in investigating the neural correlates of clinical symptoms and cognitive deficits experienced by patients.