Narrator: This is Science Today. Frontotemporal dementia, or FTD, is a group of diseases that are commonly misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's Disease.

Boxer: We see a number of different, possible patterns of brain damage and what's sort of common to all of them is that different nerve cells die out and the connections between the nerve cells die out. But in some of the cells that are preserved, we can see little accumulations of proteins.

Narrator: Dr. Adam Boxer of the University of California, San Francisco's Memory and Aging Center explains that the proteins found in FTD, as well as Alzheimer's, are most commonly called tau, a protein that's normally part of nerve cells. But there's another protein that researchers are now starting to see a lot called ubiquitin.

Boxer: Ubiquitin is actually not just a protein, but it's a tag - it's a small, little fragmented protein that cells put on proteins within themselves to target them for destruction.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.