researchers in a race against time may have found a way to detect dementia years earlier by looking at the blood — and chequebook
s
— of patients.
dementia, an umbrella term for a range of debilitating brain conditions, is a difficult
–
to
–
diagnose,
slow-developing
disease characterized by symptoms such as memory loss, mood changes and difficulty thinking.
if
caught
earlier, however, patient outcomes can vastly improve.
“currently there are no effective treatments to delay or reverse symptoms of dementia,”
said lauren hersch nicholas
, an
associate professor in the department of health policy and management at the bloomberg school. nicholas and a team of u.s. researchers focused on a novel area when studying brain health: credit scores and financial issues.
to test their monetary theory, the team looked at just over 81,000 patients from single-person households that were receiving medicare benefits. of this group, 54,062 had not received a dementia diagnosis between 1999 and 2014, while the remaining 27,302 had. they compared this info to the credit card data of these patients between 1999 and 2018, focusing on the financial shortcomings of both groups.
“those with (alzheimer disease and related dementias) were more likely to miss bill payments up to six years prior to diagnosis and started to develop subprime credit scores 2.5 years prior to diagnosis compared with those never diagnosed,” the researchers concluded. “these negative financial outcomes persisted after adrd diagnosis, accounted for 10 per cent to 15 per cent of missed payments in our sample, and were more prevalent in census tracts with less college education.”
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