mindalert

The main val­ue of the inde­pen­dent NIH pan­el men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous arti­cle comes from the rec­om­men­da­tions it makes for research, indus­try and gov­ern­ment to fill the gaps in the sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence in years to come.

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In fact, hav­ing access to objec­tive, auto­mat­ed assess­ments to help con­sumers bet­ter mon­i­tor their cog­ni­tive health and take proac­tive, informed action is the one part of the brain fit­ness puz­zle that is bad­ly needed.

It is esti­mat­ed that 60% of peo­ple with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease go undi­ag­nosed. Most patients today get diag­nosed with Alzheimer’s too late and based on tools which are not sen­si­tive enough to pick up on sub­tle prob­lems in think­ing and mem­o­ry need­ed to make accu­rate diag­no­sis and dis­tin­guish among dif­fer­ent mem­o­ry dis­or­ders. This often results in hav­ing many indi­vid­u­als with high edu­ca­tion and intel­lect appear ‘nor­mal’ when in fact they have an Alzheimer’s‑induced mem­o­ry and cog­ni­tive slowdown.

Note: You can keep read­ing the arti­cle To Man­age Brain Fit­ness Through Life, We Need to Put Puz­zle Pieces Togeth­er in the web­site of the Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Aging (arti­cle link opens PDF). ASA recent­ly asked me to write a cou­ple of arti­cles on lat­est brain fit­ness and cog­ni­tive health trends for their Min­dAlert ini­tia­tive, and this is the sec­ond of the two.