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A safe, simple and quick test to screen elderly people people at risk for dementia still hasn't been developed. Now that there are medications to slow Alzheimer's disease if you catch it early enough, there's more incentive to find out whether someone's heading down the dementia track. The question is whether there's a cheap and effective way of picking up dementia when it hasn't blossomed into full forgetfulness. A group in Sweden evaluated a fairly fast way of assessing a person's thinking ability, brain functioning and memory. They gave the tests to nearly 1500 elderly people aged between 75 and 95, who had no dementia, then followed them for three years to see whether the test results predicted brain decline. They found that having abnormalities in all three tests was quite a good predictor of dementia, but only in those who had the abnormalities. That sounds as if I'm demented but what I mean is that of all those who developed dementia fewer than one in five had bad scores on the combined tests. So the tests missed 80 percent. Having complaints about your memory was a better predictor but comfortingly, if you're having trouble remembering thingummy's name - you know, thingummy, the one you've known since you were ten - a large proportion of such people do not go on to dementia in the medium term.
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