For many families, the first signs of dementia are not memory problems but unexpected changes in personality and behavior.
A normally calm person may become impulsive, lose empathy, or stop caring about work and relationships. When these changes happen in middle age, doctors often suspect a mental health condition rather than a disease affecting the brain.
This is especially true for behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, a form of early-onset dementia that can begin decades before most people expect dementia to appear.
Because its symptoms closely resemble psychiatric illnesses, the condition is frequently missed for years. Delayed diagnosis can leave patients and families searching for answers while the disease continues to progress.
Researchers from the University of Sydney have now identified a practical way that may improve diagnosis. Their study was published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment, & Disease Monitoring. Rather than developing a new scanner or laboratory test, the researchers investigated how doctors could gain more information from MRI scans already collected during routine care.
The project was led by Dr. Chloe Beydoun, who started the work as a medical student before becoming a clinical intern. Supported by Associate Professor Ramon Landin-Romero and Dr. Jessica Hazelton, she learned to use visual rating scales to assess brain shrinkage on MRI images. These structured guides direct attention to specific brain regions that are commonly affected by the disease.
The researchers found that using these scales helped clinicians identify characteristic patterns of brain shrinkage more consistently. This increased confidence in diagnosis and reduced differences between individual doctors when interpreting MRI scans. It also helped predict how the disease may progress over time.
Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia mainly affects behavior, decision-making, and social skills rather than memory. As a result, many patients are first treated for depression, anxiety, or other psychiatric disorders. Previous studies suggest this can delay the correct diagnosis by four to five years.
Receiving an earlier diagnosis does not cure the disease, but it gives families valuable time to prepare. Patients can access support services sooner, make decisions about employment, driving, finances, and future care, and better understand the cause of the changes they are experiencing.
The researchers say the visual rating scales are already available and could be introduced into routine practice through additional training. Because no expensive equipment is required, this approach could be relatively easy for many hospitals and clinics to adopt.
This research is also a reminder that student-led projects can make meaningful contributions to medicine. With experienced supervision, a placement project developed into published research that could influence everyday clinical practice around the world.
The findings are encouraging because they offer a practical solution to a long-standing problem instead of relying on costly new technology. However, the study focuses on improving diagnosis rather than treatment, and broader clinical studies will be needed to confirm the benefits in different hospitals and health systems.
Even so, the research provides an important step toward faster and more accurate diagnosis for people living with this often misunderstood disease.
If you care about dementia, please read studies about Vitamin B9 deficiency linked to higher dementia risk, and flavonoid-rich foods could help prevent dementia.
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