A computerised test identifies impaired cognitive function in the prodromal stages of genetic Frontotemporal Dementia

<h3></h3> <i>Ignite</i> is an iPad app designed to test cognitive functions impaired in the early stages of genetic FTD. Normative data from &gt;2000 participants is used to z-score outcomes, adjusting for age, sex, and education. 73 Genetic FTD Initiative (GENFI) participants completed <i>Ignite</i> on 4 occasions over 4 weeks, in a burst-testing protocol that enables the examination of practice effects. Of these, 26 were controls and 47 were mutation carriers (29 C9orf72, 16 MAPT, and 2 GRN). Carriers were divided into 3 groups – 7 symptomatic carriers (SCs) with behavioural variant FTD, 10 prodromal carriers (PCs), defined by global CDR plus NACC FTLD score of 0.5 and plasma NfL &gt;13.6 pg/ml, and 30 asymptomatic carriers (ACs). Cross- sectional analysis using linear regression at timepoint 4 demonstrated worse performance by SCs compared to controls across all 15 tasks (p&lt;0.05) and across 14/15 tasks compared to ACs (difference scores -1.16 to -4.22, p&lt;0.01). PCs performed worse than ACs in 9/15 tasks (p&lt;0.05) and controls in 12/15 tasks (difference scores -0.84 to -1.67, p&lt;0.05). In summary <i>Ignite</i> was able to detect impairments in executive and visuospatial functions, social cognition, semantic knowledge, and calculation in prodromal carriers when compared to asymptomatic carriers and controls.