Consciencia del otro en patologías neurodegenerativas

Resumo

This review presents data about an emerging concept called «Consciousness of others» in Alzheimer's disease and behavioural variant fronto-temporal dementia. Consciousness of others is the awareness that one has of others, and it could be considered key in the understanding of behavioural problems in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and fronto-temporal dementia. Consciousness of others is multifactorial and it includes the following aspects: emotional face recognition, emotional prosody, pragmatic of language, mentalisation, empathy, and social reasoning. Subtypes of dementias heterogeneously affect the different aspects of consciousness of others. In general, patients with a behavioural variant of fronto-temporal dementia presented with more problems of consciousness of others than those with Alzheimer's disease. In particular, patients with Alzheimer's disease showed more difficulties in the aspect of language pragmatic, which was associated with the severity of cognitive impairment, but they could maintain a good social sense. However, patients with frontal variant fronto-temporal dementia showed problems in every component of the consciousness of others, thus having important problems to properly regulate their social behaviour. Further studies are needed for a better knowledge of the complex relationship between different aspects of consciousness of others in dementias for a better understanding of behavioural troubles.