At 32, a man in Bangladesh began changing in ways his family could not explain. He became withdrawn, lost empathy, used inappropriate language, and grew aggressive. His job ended, his marriage broke down, and he came to depend on his family's supervision. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and given a series of psychiatric drugs, yet he kept getting worse.
By the time neurologists evaluated him at 35, about three years after his symptoms began, a brain MRI told a different story. His frontal and temporal lobes, the brain regions that govern personality, judgment, and social behavior, had shrunk markedly. The diagnosis was probable behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), a progressive brain disease that rarely strikes people this young.
