Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a common form of early-onset dementia, is marked by impairments in behavior, language, and sometimes motor function. Unlike Alzheimer's Disease (AD), researchers and clinicians have been unable to accurately predict the onset of symptoms for individuals having a familial form of the condition.

While there has been significant growth in the development of therapies targeting the familial forms of frontotemporal lobe dementia (f-FTD), there is an urgent, unmet need to organize clinical trials to test these therapies due to the rarity of eligible of participants with mutations and the lack of experience with testing therapies in pre-symptomatic f-FTD mutation carriers.

Although f-FTD is rare, the genes that cause this disease are also strongly implicated in more common neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, suggesting that identification of effective f-FTD treatments could speed the development of treatments for more common diseases.

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