<unk>  patients generally have difficulty generating familiar words or recognizing familiar objects and faces. Clinical signs include fluent aphasia, anomia, impaired comprehension of word meaning, and associative visual agnosia (inability to match<unk> ally related pictures or objects). As the disease progresses, behavioral and personality changes are often seen similar to those seen in frontotemporal dementia.<unk>  patients perform poorly on tests of<unk>  knowledge. Published tests include both verbal and non-verbal tasks, e.g., The Warrington Concrete and Abstract Word Synonym Test, and The Pyramids and Palm Trees task. Testing also reveals deficits in picture naming (e.g. "dog" for a picture of a hippopotamus) and decreased category fluency. The question "What is a Stapler?" has been used as a primary diagnostic technique for discerning how<unk>  patients understand word meaning. Speech of<unk>  patients is marked by word-finding pauses, reduced frequency of content words,<unk>  paraphasias, circumlocutions, increased ratios of verbs to nouns, increased numbers of adverbs, and multiple repeats.<unk>  patients sometimes show symptoms of surface dyslexia, a relatively selective impairment in reading low-frequency words with exceptional or atypical spelling-to-sound correspondences. It is currently unknown why<unk>  memory is impaired and<unk>  knowledge deteriorates in<unk>  patients, though the cause may be due to damage to an amodal<unk>  system. This theory is supported by the atrophy of the anterior temporal lobe, which is believed to contain a component of the<unk>  system that integrates conceptual information. Others hypothesize that the damage is predominantly to the ventral temporal cortex, since<unk>  patients remember numbers and music, but have trouble associating visual cues to concrete words. Due to the variety of symptoms dementia patients present, it becomes more difficult to assess<unk>  memory capability especially with regard to musical elements. In order to circumvent the explicit verbal learning tests for dementia,<unk>  melodic matching is a useful technique for detecting the<unk>  memory of<unk>  patients. Moreover, it is important to maintain that these tests must be compared to nonmusical domain tests, as music cognition is not often measured in<unk>  patients (less data available). Physical changes Structural and functional MRI imaging show a characteristic pattern of atrophy in the temporal lobes (predominantly on the left), with inferior greater than superior involvement and anterior temporal lobe atrophy greater than posterior. This distinguishes it from Alzheimer's disease. Meta-analyses on MRI and FDG-PET studies confirmed these findings by identifying alterations in the inferior temporal poles and amygdalae as the hotspots of disease - brain regions that have been discussed in the context of conceptual knowledge,<unk>  information processing, and social cognition. Based on these imaging methods,<unk>  can be regionally dissociated from the other subtypes of frontotemporal lobar degeneration, frontotemporal dementia, and progressive nonfluent aphasia. Selective hypometabolism of glucose has been observed in the anterior temporal lobe, as well as the medial temporal lobe and limbic areas. Damage to white matter tracts connecting the anterior temporal cortex to the inferior longitudinal, arcuate, and uncinate fasciculi, which are regions of the language network, is also seen using diffusion tensor imaging. Imaging also shows the integrity of the axonal connections from the anterior temporal cortex to frontal and posterior associative areas to be altered. Functional abnormalities have also been observed in hippocampal structures, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and the cingulate cortex. Memory in dementia: musical objects, musical concepts, and<unk>  memory Melodies are a key aspect of musical objects that are thought to form the contents of<unk>  memory for music. Melodies are defined as familiar tunes that become associated with musical or extra musical meaning. Using familiar songs, such as Christmas carols, were used to test whether<unk>  patients were able to recognize the tones and melodies of the songs if the patients were just given the words of the song. In the analysis of<unk>  memory using melodies as stimuli, the contents of<unk>  memory can include many other aspects aside from recognition of the melody, such as the general information about the music (composer, genre, year of release). Results have shown that musicians who suffer from<unk>  are able to identify and recognize certain melodic tones. Further exploring the tests of music and<unk>  memory, results of a study that centered on the comprehension of emotion in music indicated that Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) patients retained the ability to discern emotions from a song while non-AD degenerative disease patients, such as those with<unk>  <unk> , show impaired comprehension of these emotions. Moreover, several dementia patients, all with varied musical experience and knowledge, all demonstrated an understanding of the fundamental governing rules of western music. Essentially, it was found that superordinate knowledge of music, such as the rules of composition, may be more robust than knowledge of specific music. Regarding the neurobiological correlates for this study, it was determined, via lesion studies, that bilateral (but especially the left-side of the brain) fronto-temporoparietal areas are significant in the associative processing of melodies. Based on the data of imaging studies that looked at the localization of processing melodies, it can be inferred that the anatomical location of the processes in consistent with the findings that some<unk>  patients have intact melody recognition. Additionally, the neurobiological basis for musical emotion identification implicated the limbic and paralimbic structures in this process. Overall, the results of these studies suggest that the neurobiological basis of musical<unk>  memory is bilaterally located in the cerebral hemispheres, likely around the fronto-temporal areas of the brain. Unfortunately, due to the lack of studies studying musical<unk>  memory, conclusions cannot be more specific.
Semantic dementia
Subcortical dementia
Vascular dementia
Lewy body dementias
Dementia with Lewy bodies
Frontotemporal dementia
Normal pressure hydrocephalus
Alcohol-related dementia