The early stages of dementia play out in a variety of subtle and insidious ways. It can be far more than just misplaced keys and forgotten names: people’s entire personalities may gradually change; their social skills deteriorate; their ability to command spoken language slowly disappears (a symptom that has famously—and tragically—plagued movie star Bruce Willis).
All these different symptoms reflect physical changes in the human brain, or the gradual scrambling of the neural circuits that make us who we are. While the exact causes of dementia can vary, the damage that occurs in the brain can be strikingly similar in all cases.
Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior Edward “Ted” Huey, MD, has spent his career working to understand and treat those neurological changes. As the new director of the Memory and Aging Program at Butler Hospital and an affilated faculty member of the Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research in the Division of Biology and Medicine and the Carney Institute for Brain Science, he’s particularly interested in a rare form of the disorder called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. It’s a strange beast marked not by memory loss, but by precipitous declines in a patient’s ability to control social and behavioral skills. In this interview, Huey talks about his fascination with FTD, how he studies its causes, his vision for the future of dementia research at Brown, and more.