What is frontotemporal dementia or FTD? Bruce Willis’ aphasia diagnosis worsens

Retired actor Bruce Willis has been diagnosed with dementia aged just 67.

“Since we announced Bruce’s diagnosis of aphasia in spring 2022, Bruce’s condition has progressed and we now have a more specific diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia (known as FTD),” the family statement read.

“Unfortunately, challenges with communication are just one symptom of the disease Bruce faces. While this is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis.”

Willis has featured in a large number of famous films over the decades, such as ‘Die Hard’, ‘Pulp Fiction’, ‘Armageddon’ and ‘The Sixth Sense.’

While Willis will be best remembered for his starring roles in the eighties and nineties, questions will be asked of the amount of roles in direct-to-video releases in the last years of his career. A glance at his wikipedia page shows him performing in a staggering 26 films that never saw the cinema in the last three years alone.

An LA Times report from March 2022 suggests that directors ignored Willis’ condition and took steps to ensure he could still perform even with memory problems.

“It looks like we need to knock down Bruce’s page count by about 5 pages,” Mike Burns, the director of “Out of Death,” wrote in a June 2020 email to the film’s screenwriter. “We also need to abbreviate his dialogue a bit so that there are no monologues, etc.”

What is frontotemporal dementia?

According to the British National Health Service (NHS), frontotemporal dementia is an uncommon type of dementia that causes problems with behaviour and language, reflected in the original aphasia diagnosis.

Symptoms include:

There are no known treatments and the illness can last for multiple years.