Key clinical point: Awareness of time may be disturbed in patients with dementia. Symptoms of altered temporal awareness may differ between patients with frontotemporal dementia and patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

Major finding: Patients with dementia were significantly more likely to exhibit temporal awareness symptoms, compared with healthy older individuals. Patients with typical and logopenic Alzheimer’s disease most often exhibited disturbed event ordering or interval estimation, whereas patients with semantic dementia were most prone to temporal rigidity and clockwatching. Patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia exhibited a propensity to relive past events in addition to the other symptoms.

Study details: A semi-structured survey that captured time-related behavioral alterations in 71 patients with sporadic and genetic syndromes of frontotemporal dementia, 28 patients with typical Alzheimer’s disease, nine patients with logopenic aphasia, and 32 healthy older individuals.

Disclosures: The investigators are affiliated with a research center that is supported by Alzheimer’s Research UK, Brain Research UK, and the Wolfson Foundation. This study was funded by the Alzheimer’s Society, Alzheimer’s Research UK, the National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Center, and the UCL Leonard Wolfson Center for Experimental Neurology. Individual authors were supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Wolfson Foundation, Bart’s Charity, the Medical Research Council, Alzheimer’s Society, Brain Research UK, and Action on Hearing Loss. The authors had no conflicts of interest.