Empathy in primary progressive aphasia: Neural signatures and longitudinal trajectories
Natacha Cordonier, Sophie Matis, Her Teng, James Carrick, Yun Hwang, Rebekah M Ahmed, Ramón Landin‐Romero, Olivier Piguet · 2026
Read Empathy in primary progressive aphasia: Neural signatures and longitudinal trajectories by Natacha Cordonier, Sophie Matis, Her Teng, James Carrick, Yun Hwang, Rebekah M Ahmed, Ramón Landin‐Romero, Olivier Piguet (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13240075.txt.
Description
Natacha Cordonier and seven co-authors chart how empathy fades in two language-led dementias, in this 2026 study. The conditions are the nonfluent and logopenic variants of primary progressive aphasia, where language erodes first. Thirty-four patients with one variant, thirty-eight with the other, and forty-five healthy controls took empathy questionnaires and brain scans, with follow-up stretching to nine years.
At the start, both patient groups showed blunted cognitive empathy, the ability to take another's viewpoint, while emotional empathy stayed intact. In the nonfluent group, weaker empathy rode alongside wider thinking deficits and predicted heavier caregiver burden. Over time empathy held steady in the nonfluent group but declined in the logopenic one. Brain analyses tied the losses to temporal, parietal, and frontal-insular regions, with frontal shrinkage forecasting decline in the logopenic group. The authors flag empathy as an early, trackable casualty.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Natacha Cordonier, Sophie Matis, Her Teng, James Carrick, Yun Hwang, Rebekah M Ahmed, Ramón Landin‐Romero, Olivier Piguet |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 43 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |