You have trouble following a conversation. You find it hard to make decisions, finish a task or follow instructions. You start to have trouble finding your way around places you know well. You begin to have poor judgment.
“Cognitive decline may begin after midlife, but most often occurs at higher ages (70 or higher).” (Aartsen, et al., 2002) “… relatively little decline in performance occurs until people are about 50 years old.” (Albert & Heaton, 1988).
The Self-Administered Gerocognitive Exam, known as SAGE, is a brief, pen-and-paper cognitive assessment tool designed to detect the early signs of cognitive, memory, or thinking impairments. The test evaluates your thinking abilities. This can help your doctors understand how well your brain is functioning.
Cognitive decline can range from mild cognitive impairment to dementia, a form of decline in abilities severe enough to interfere with daily life. Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia.
Administration: The examiner reads a list of 5 words at a rate of one per second, giving the following instructions: “This is a memory test. I am going to read a list of words that you will have to remember now and later on. Listen carefully. When I am through, tell me as many words as you can remember.
The Mini-Cog test.
A third test, known as the Mini-Cog, takes 2 to 4 minutes to administer and involves asking patients to recall three words after drawing a picture of a clock. If a patient shows no difficulties recalling the words, it is inferred that he or she does not have dementia.
The five-minute cognitive test (FCT) was designed to capture deficits in five domains of cognitive abilities, including episodic memory, language fluency, time orientation, visuospatial function, and executive function.
High blood pressure causes faster cognitive decline, and that taking hypertension medication slows the pace of that decline.
An estimated 10 to 20% of people age 65 or older with MCI develop dementia over a one-year period. However, not everyone who has MCI develops dementia. In many cases, the symptoms of MCI may stay the same or even improve.
While age is the primary risk factor for cognitive impairment, other risk factors include family history, education level, brain injury, exposure to pesticides or toxins, physical inactivity, and chronic conditions such as Parkinson's disease, heart disease and stroke, and diabetes.
What is mild cognitive impairment? Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a condition in which someone has minor problems with cognition - their mental abilities such as memory or thinking. In MCI these difficulties are worse than would normally be expected for a healthy person of their age.
Age is the primary cause of cognitive impairment. Other risk factors include family history, physical inactivity, and disease/conditions such as Parkinson's disease, heart disease, stroke, brain injury, brain cancers, drugs, toxins, and diabetes.
Commonly used tests include: Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test. This test takes about 15 minutes. It includes memorizing a short list of words, copying a drawing of a shape or object, and looking at pictures of animals and saying which animals you see.
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is the stage between the expected decline in memory and thinking that happens with age and the more serious decline of dementia. MCI may include problems with memory, language or judgment. People with MCI may be aware that their memory or mental function has "slipped."
MCI means that the cognitive declines do not affect the person's ability to carry out everyday tasks (e.g., shopping, cooking, driving), while dementia indicates those cognitive difficulties are impacting the person's ability to complete everyday tasks.
Simplistically, the test involves an examiner putting his or her hands into a specific shape — for example, interlocking the fingers in a particular manner — and then having the patient try to mimic it. Patients are evaluated on how well they can reproduce the specific shape created by the examiner.
The SAGE test is a 12-question exam that measures cognitive functioning and may help a physician determine whether Alzheimer's is present. It's recommended that you bring your completed test to a medical professional who can score and interpret the results. If necessary, your doctors will provide further screening.
The Six Item Cognitive Impairment Test (6CIT) is a brief cognitive function test which takes less than five minutes and is widely used in primary care settings. It involves three orientation items – counting backwards from 20, stating the months of the year in reverse and learning an address.
A list of ten unrelated words are orally presented one by one, and subjects are instructed to recall as many items as possible immediately after their presentation (immediate free recall, the traditional span task) and after a predetermined time, in general 5 to 10 minutes (delayed free recall).
The goal is to ask the person to simply name as many animals as possible in a certain time period, such as one minute. You must write down the answers, so you can check for duplicate responses. You do not count nor do you mention that they already said that one before.