Daniel Marson of the neurology department and the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who led the study, stated, "The capacity to manage one's own financial affairs is critical to success in independent living. Impairments in financial skills and judgment are often the first functional changes demonstrated by patients with incipient dementia."
Study undertakes financial skills assessment
The researchers followed 87 older people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) but no symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and 76 people with no memory problems for one year.
To gauge their financial management capacity, the participants were given a money management test at the beginning of the study and another a year later.
To check their conceptual, pragmatic and judgmental abilities, the patients were assessed on a variety of monetary skills.
The tasks assigned varied from simple ones like coin-counting and paying bills, to complex ones like making a bank statement, balancing checkbooks, preparing bills for mailing and exercising financial judgment in detecting a fraudulent financial situation.
Observations by the researchers
Researchers observed that after one year, 25 of the 87 people with MCI had progressed to Alzheimer's disease. Their test scores decreased by 6 percent in overall financial knowledge and they demonstrated a drop of 9 percent on their skills of checkbook management.
On the other hand, the healthy older adults did not progress to Alzheimer’s and maintained the same level of scores throughout the year.
“Our findings show that declining money management skills are detectable in patients with MCI in the year prior to developing Alzheimer’s disease,” says Marson.
Recommendations by researchers
The researchers recommended that families need to keep a close vigil on the financial transactions of patients with MCI to safe guard and protect them from exploitation.
"Doctors should proactively monitor people with MCI for declining financial skills and advise them and their caregivers about steps they can take to watch for signs of poor money management," Marson said.
"Caregivers should consider overseeing a person's checking transactions, contacting the person's bank to find money issues, such as bills being paid twice, or become co-signers on the checking account so that both signatures are required for checks written above a certain amount. Online banking and bill payment services are also good options," he added.
The study appears in the September issue of Neurology.
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