But Sha says that's a 10-minute screening test designed to flag major deficits, not an in-depth look at cognitive function. Assessing a presidentĭuring his presidency, Donald Trump said that he "aced" a test called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment or MoCA. A retired professor, for example, may do well on cognitive tests despite a significant mental decline. The total possible score is 30 points a score of 26 or above is considered normal. Time to administer the MoCA is approximately 10 minutes. It's also critical to measure a person's current cognitive performance against their performance earlier in life, Sha says. The MoCA may be administered by anyone who understands and follows the instructions, however, only a health professional with expertise in the cognitive field may interpret the results. "We ask about depression and anxiety, we ask about medication." "We often ask about sleep because that can impair memory," Sha says. Part of the process of diagnosing a brain problem is ruling out other factors. "Some people are reading too much into little snippets of interviews without really knowing what's going on behind the scenes," he says. MoCA has been subsequently adopted in clinical settings around the world and is widely used as a scale in academic and non-academic research. An estimated 40% of people between 80 and 85 have either dementia, which makes independent living difficult, or what's known as mild cognitive impairment.īut diagnosing those conditions requires more than an hour of testing and a thorough history of someone's life, Tan says, not just watching a few seconds of a press conference. "Trying to remember that name of the restaurant that they were in last week or the name of the person that they met for coffee, that is not in itself a sign of dementia," Tan says, "but it's a sign of cognitive aging." A glitch or a problem?Īlzheimer's and other forms of dementia become more common with each passing decade. But in many older people, the brain's ability to quickly retrieve that information becomes less reliable. "As we age, that might diminish to something like six digits, but not zero."Ī healthy brain typically retains its ability to learn and store information. But it's less likely to make a difference to someone who is doing "an executive-level job, where there is a lot of support and a lot more time to do planning and decision making."Īnother cognitive change associated with age involves working memory, which allows us to keep in mind a password or phone number for a few seconds or minutes.Ī typical person in their 20s might be able to reliably hold seven digits in working memory, Sha says. That may be a problem for a race car driver or an airline pilot, Tan says. Slower processing means a person may take longer to respond to a question or make a decision. One reason for the decline is a decrease in the speed at which the brain processes information. "Even the so-called successful agers, if you measure their cognitive performance, you will see certain changes compared to their baseline," Tan says. But all brains lose a step or two with age. Sharon Sha, a clinical professor of neurology at Stanford University.Ĭognitive changes are often associated with diseases like Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. MMSE score were compared with a bootstrap two-sided significance test for correlated ROC curves. The temporary inability to remember names, in particular, "is very common as we get older," says Dr. doi:10.7759/cureus.Also, memory lapses become more common with age, even in people whose brains are perfectly healthy. Neuroimaging in dementia: a brief review. doi:10.3233/JAD-170991īanerjee D, Muralidharan A, Hakim Mohammed AR, Malik BH. The Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive Subscale (ADAS-Cog): modifications and responsiveness in pre-dementia populations. Kueper JK, Speechley M, Montero-odasso M. The usfulness of the SLUMS test for diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment and dementia. The original validation study for the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) suggests a cutoff score of 26 however, this may be too stringent for older adults, particularly for those with less education. The Saint Louis University mental status examination is better than the mini-mental state examination to determine the cognitive impairment in Turkish elderly people. Kaya D, Isik AT, Usarel C, Soysal P, Ellidokuz H, Grossberg GT. Detecting change over time: a comparison of the SLUMS examination and the MMSE in older adults at risk for cognitive decline. Howland M, Tatsuoka C, Smyth KA, Sajatovic M.
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