Question: In adults with a behavioural variant (particularly Progressive non fluent aphasia (PNFA), semantic dementia (SD), logopenic dementia) of frontotemporal dementia (FTDbv) how effective are cholinesterase inhibitors or memantine, for achieving improved patient outcomes?

Answer:

Evidence on the effectiveness of cholinesterase inhibitors or memantine for the treatment of adults with a behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia was very weak. Three very small, poor quality studies reported trends in favour of memantine or galantamine, compared to placebo, on a minority of reported outcome measures. No study reported a statistically significant treatment effect on any outcome measure. There is currently insufficient evidence to support the use of memantine or cholinesterase inhibitors in the specified population. As concluded by all of the study authors, their initial findings support the need for further, large scale randomised controlled trials.

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