Each week, OMRF Chief Medical Officer Dr. Judith James opens “Adam’s Journal” to answer a medical question from Adam Cohen, OMRF’s senior vice president & general counsel.
Adam’s Journal
I visited my mother this past week, and on the heels of her 88th birthday, she remains her usual joyful, sunny self. However, she’s showing some memory challenges, and my sister and I have assumed management of her finances after she failed to pay her income and property taxes.
How typical is it for financial issues to precede the onset of memory disorders?
Dr. James Prescribes
Financial decisions involve a broad range of cognitive skills, including organization, information retrieval, mathematical analysis, and processing and integration of multiple variables and scenarios. So, it follows that people who develop age-related cognitive difficulties would struggle with managing their finances.
Over the years, a series of studies have suggested that financial decision-making is one of the first areas affected by early-stage cognitive impairment associated with Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, stroke and related disorders. And a comprehensive new analysis from a team of economists and medical researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University provides striking new evidence that this is, indeed, the case.
The researchers combined Medicare records with data from the credit bureau Equifax and analyzed how more people’s behavior changed in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar condition. They found that among people who later developed dementia, their credit scores began falling well before their disease was diagnosed.
For example, in the year before diagnosis, they were 17% more likely to be delinquent on mortgage payments than they had been in the past and 34% more likely to have unpaid credit card bills. The researchers found evidence that the problems likely start much earlier, with people beginning to miss payments a half-decade before diagnosis.
These findings confirm what families and caregivers already understand: Financial decision-making can decline long before a formal diagnosis is made – or even suspected. People may not only miss payments but they also may display poor judgment on financial transactions, which can take the form of impulse buying, risky investments, and falling prey to scam and fraud.
As you and your sister have no doubt learned, walking the line between respecting an older person’s independence and protecting their financial resources can be difficult. Still, it’s crucial to pay close attention to any changes in a person’s financial behaviors, as they may signal the need for a cognitive evaluation or a discussion with their doctor.
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James is executive vice president and chief medical officer of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Cohen, a marathoner, is OMRF’s senior vice president and general counsel. Send your health questions to contact@omrf.org.
