With FTD now affecting some 24 million it is time to make this little known disease come to the forefront of the medical research arena.

Charlie Rose Brain Series 2: Generalized Defects in Cognition: Alzheimer’s Disease with Eric Kandel of Columbia University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne of Rockefeller University, Alison Goate of Washington University’s School of Medicine in St. Louis, David Holtzman of Washington University in St. Louis and Bruce Miller of University of California, San Francisco

Dr. Bruce Miller, Director, Memory and Aging Center, UC San Francisco discusses FTD with the Brain Series panel.

The UCSF Memory and Aging Center is at the forefront of discovering the causes, treatments and cures of dementia. All of the dementias — including Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia (FTD), Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), Huntington’s disease and Lewy body dementias — share common features. They all are illnesses in which normal proteins are misprocessed.

Neurologist William Seeley was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. The Fellowship is a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant for individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more. Learn more at ‪http://www.macfound.org/fellows

Dementia is a problem of the elderly, right? Generally that’s true. But there is one form of the disease that can strike people when they are very young, in their 20′s or even their teens. It’s called Frontotemporal Dementia, or FTD. And while rare, it devastates lives by rapidly turning young, vital people into those who need constant care.