Financial habits maybe as important as a brain scan to identify Alzheimer's

Your financial habits may be just as important as a brain scan when it comes to diagnosing Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Look no further than anyone who’s been diagnosed with a form of dementia, and their families will tell you the signs were there. They just didn’t know what to look for.

There's something about financial transactions that are so sensitive to difficulties with thinking, concentrating, paying attention, learning new information that often they're the first things when you look back, where the signs were there before the repetitive questions, the repetitious stories, the burned dinner, etc," Karlawish is considered one of the nation’s leading Alzheimer’s researchers. He’s a Professor of Medicine, Medical Ethics and Health Policy and Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania and is the Co-Director of the Penn Memory Centre.

He identified financial habits as tools for early diagnosis when new patients continued to land in his office after making a series of devastating financial errors. “There’s no reason why these errors have to be discovered by walking into a room full of fire and smoke. There should be far better alarms set-up, and even ways to predict people who might catch fire, if you will”.