The Dementia You Have Never Heard Of (Until Now)

Apple, table, penny. Remember those words.

Now draw a clock face and note the time as ten minutes after eleven.

Those two tasks are part of a routine cognitive (brain) assessment given to those of us who have more sand at the bottom of the hourglass. These questions help our primary care doctors assess if we’re losing it, mentally.

We all fear dementia. And the puzzling question is how will we know? One way docs use is the Mini-Mental exam — a 30-question assessment aimed at finding missing pieces in the aging brain.

That’s where I began my journey into my brain six months ago during a routine exam. I’m 82. Although my score was above the normal threshold, my internal medicine doc suggested a more formal baseline test. Not that he suspected I had issues but to assess where I was so in the future we’d have a comparison.

Read the rest of this blog post on Medium:

https://medium.com/wise-well/the-dementia-you-have-never-heard-of-until-now-974519f632d2?sk=b28ab926e3776c96783fd474f5658fe0