Selective Vulnerability in Neurodegenerative Disease
My laboratory studies the onset and spread of neurodegenerative disease. We focus on frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a major cause of early age of onset dementia in which most patients develop social-emotional or language dysfunction and progress to death within 5-8 years of diagnosis. We combine clinical and neuroimaging data from living patients with post-mortem pathological observations in the same patients to build more comprehensive models of disease pathogenesis.