Confabulation in a patient with fronto-temporal dementia and a patient with Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

This paper describes two patients, O.I. and B.Y., with a confabulatory syndrome. O.I. was diagnosed with probable fronto-temporal dementia, whereas B.Y. met the criteria for probable Alzheimer's disease. O.I., but not B.Y., was impaired on tests of frontal/executive functions, and performed better than B.Y. on clinical tests of memory. Both patients confabulated in episodic/autobiographical memory tasks and in personal future planning tasks. B.Y. confabulated also in a semantic memory task. It is argued that the pattern of confabulation and the cognitive profile shown by the two patients is explained better by the hypothesis proposed by Dalla Barba and co-workers (Dalla Barba et al., 1997b) than by current theories of confabulation.