As plaque deposits increase in the aging brain, money management falters

Scans of two study participants show the brain of a cognitively healthy 74-year-old (top row) who demonstrated average financial skills compared to an 86-year-old with mild Alzheimer’s disease (bottom row) who demonstrated impaired financial skills. The bottom scan is positive for amyloid plaques, highlighted in yellow and orange throughout the brain and extending to its edges. Credit: Duke Health Aging adults often show signs of slowing when it comes to managing their finances, such as calculating their change when paying cash or balancing an account ledger. These changes happen even in adults who are cognitively healthy. But trouble managing money can also be a harbinger of dementia and, according to new Duke research in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease, could be correlated to the amount of protein deposits built up in the brain. "There has been a misperception that financial difficulty may occur only in the late stages of dementia, but this can happen early and the changes can be subtle," said P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, a professor of psychiatry and geriatrics at Duke and senior author of the paper. "The more we can understand adults’ financial decision-making capacity and how that may change with aging, the better we can inform society about those issues." The findings are based on 243 adults ages 55 to 90 participating in a longitudinal study called the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, which included tests of financial skills and brain scans to reveal protein buildup of beta-amyloid plaques. The study included cognitively healthy adults , adults with mild memory impairment (sometimes an Alzheimer’s precursor) and adults with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Testing revealed that specific financial skills declined with age and at the earliest stages of mild memory impairment. The decline was similar in men and women. After controlling for a person’s education […]

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