a shockingly difficult problem, having lived through this with my dad. he had early cognitive stuff going on that we had no way of realizing until he started making bizarrely bad choices.
> While cognitive tests to distinguish mild cognitive impairment from pathologic decline do exist, they take about 15 minutes, which can be hard to come by during the limited time of a doctor’s visit and may require a follow-up appointment.
... does the test really need to be administered by a doctor, or could some other trained person in the health care context likely administer the test?
> While distinct, symptoms are subtle and their slow progression means that they can be overlooked or misinterpreted as normal aging.
Maybe in a mass communications piece about mild cognitive impairment, it might be useful to say something about what distinguishes it from "normal aging".
What are you going to do with the diagnosis? Charge them higher insurance? Tell em they’re dumb? Prevent them from driving? Give them a cash handout? Better not to know.
In some cases there are easily treatable factors. For example the patient may have a vitamin deficiency. In this case they could feasibly halt their progression towards dementia by taking an inexpensive pill today. Human factors are always the most difficult in medicine. We expect old people to be slow, instead of seeing senility as a slow progression in the presence of modifiable risk factors.
