P4–127: Religious dogmatism in neurodegenerative disease

Abstract

The emergence of religious dogmatism, or hyper-religiosity, in neurodegenerative disease has been previously described but prevalence and attributes by diagnosis are not well characterized. Limbic and paralimbic brain regions, including temporal and orbitofrontal cortex, have been implicated in religious dogmatism and are selectively affected in frontotemporal lobar degenerative disorders. We examined a large cohort (N=1607) of patients which included behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; n=87), semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA; n=57), Alzheimer's disease (AD; n=237) and normal controls (NC; n=587) from the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and identified participants with a clinician-rated feature of religious dogmatism. Rates of mental rigidity were also noted. We hypothesized there would be higher rates ofreligious dogmatism in the bvFTD and svPPA groups as compared to NC and AD, and that dogmatic patients with bvFTD/svPPA would also have higher rates of mental rigidity. We identified a total of 35 participants who were rated by clinicians as exhibiting religious dogmatism: 12 patients with bvFTD, 6patients with svPPA, 2 patients with AD, and 4 NCs. Planned odds ratios were then performed to compare rates of religious dogmatism between diagnostic pairs. There were significantly higher rates of religious dogmatism in bvFTD vs. NC (OR =23.32, p<.001), svPPA vs. NC (OR =17.14, p<.001), bvFTD vs. AD (OR =18.80, p<.001), and svPPA vs. AD (OR =13.82, p<.001). Rates of dogmatism in bvFTD vs. svPPA (OR =1.36, p =.616) and AD vs. NC (OR=1.24, p =.553) were not significantly different. Patients with bvFTD/svPPA who were religiously dogmatic (n=18) had higher rates of mental rigidity than those patients who were not dogmatic (n=109), OR =9.25, p<.001. Our results find significantly higher rates of religious dogmatism in bvFTD and svPPA as compared to NC and AD, and that religious dogmatism in these patients is associated with higher rates of mental rigidity. This study suggests the selective degeneration of neural systems important for cognitive flexibility in bvFTD and svPPA may be associated with increased dogmatic beliefs in the context of religion.