INTRODUCTION:

Patients with Bipolar Disorder may present cognitive alterations that in some cases have a progressive course, whereby it has been questioned if the evolution of this disease is associated with dementia, in particular those that belong to the spectrum of frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Thereby, discriminate if a patient has a dementia secondary to the underlying psychiatric illness or if the patient presents a neurode-generative disease besides the bipolar disorder is a challenge for the differential diagnosis.

OBJECTIVE:

To compare the cognitive performance in a sample of patients with Bipolar Disorder and twenty years or more of disease progression, and patients with behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia.

MATERIALS AND METHODS:

Exploratory, descriptive and transversal study in a cohort of cases selected with a non probabilistic method. Dates are compared through non parametric statistics.

RESULTS:

Relative to Control group (N:27), Frontotemporal Dementia Patients (N:24) have significantly lower performances in verbal memory, executive functions, visoconstructional praxis and attention tasks (p <0,01). Bipolar Disorder group (N:17) has lower performances in this processes but don't present pathological markers such as intrusions and perseverative responses. There are no significant differences when comparing between clinical groups.

CONCLUSION:

Although clinical groups share the compromise in most of the cognitive process evaluated, the performances are lower in Frontotemporal dementia group, which suggests that in a degenerative disease of less evolution time and onset in presenile stage, the cognitive deficit is greater than in a chronic psychiatric illness.

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