2 everyday behaviors that could detect early dementia

• Recent studies found that erratic driving and not paying bills on time could both be early signs of dementia.
• People started missing payments six years before a clinical diagnosis.
• Other signs of dementia include memory loss and trouble problem-solving.

The problen with some of the warning signs of dementia is that they may be mistaken for aging, which makes it difficult to detect the condition early on. But what if there were ways to at least detect possible dementia through public records? Researchers investigating the options have discovered that two behavior patterns fit the bill: erratic driving and plunging credit scores.

The New York Times reported that experiments are underway with just this hypothesis — to see if dementia could be found years or decades before it fully develops. This is especially important given that young people are more prone to developing dementia than previously thought, and it’s estimated that the total number of cases globally will triple to 152.8 million in 2050.

Your driving changes

In one study, researchers said that GPS tracking may serve as an early warning for Alzheimer’s disease. The research, published in the journal Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy, included the use of GPS devices and machine learning as “digital biomarkers” to look at the driving habits of people with preclinical Alzheimer’s and a control group of regular drivers.

Researchers measured things like how often they accelerated or braked aggressively, their response to speed limits, and other measures like driving at night and the number of trips taken within a specific timeframe. Through these measures, researchers said that driving behavior and age could detect preclinical Alzheimer’s with 88% accuracy.

They also found a pattern in drivers among the preclinical Alzheimer’s group. There was a tendency to take shorter trips while avoiding driving at night, in addition to driving too slowly and sticking to routes they travel often.

You start to miss payments

Forgetting to make a credit-card payment happens from time to time, but it’s more common in Medicare beneficiaries who go on to be diagnosed with dementia, according to one study.

Researchers from the John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health found that people on Medicare who eventually were diagnosed with dementia were more likely to miss payments on bills as early as six years before a clinical diagnosis.

These missed payments also affected credit scores; researchers said that the financial pitfalls also increased the risk of developing worsening credit scores nearly three years before a dementia diagnosis.

“Dementia was the only medical condition where we saw consistent financial symptoms, especially the long period of deteriorating outcomes before clinical recognition,” one researcher said. “Our study is the first to provide large-scale quantitative evidence of the medical adage that the first place to look for dementia is in the checkbook.”