Chennai: Missing financial payments and deadlines should not be taken lightly as earlier, warns a study on dementia.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, have found that medicare beneficiaries who go on to be diagnosed with dementia, are more likely to miss payments on bills as early as six years before a clinical diagnosis.
The study published online in JAMA Internal Medicine, said that beneficiaries diagnosed with dementia, who had a lower educational status, missed payments on bills beginning as early as seven years before a clinical diagnosis as compared with 2.5 years prior to a diagnosis for beneficiaries with higher educational status.
‘Currently, there are no effective treatments to delay or reverse symptoms of dementia’, said lead author Lauren Hersch Nicholas, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School.
However, earlier screening and detection, combined with information about the risk of irreversible financial events, like foreclosure and repossession, are important to protect the financial well-being of the patient and their families.
The analysis found that the elevated risk of payment delinquency with dementia accounted for 5.2 per cent of delinquencies among those six years prior to diagnosis, reaching a maximum of 17.9 per cent nine months after diagnosis. Rates of elevated payment delinquency and subprime credit risk persisted for up to 3.5 years after beneficiaries received dementia diagnoses, suggesting an ongoing need for assistance managing money.
‘We don’t see the same pattern with other health conditions’, said Nicholas. ‘Dementia was the only medical condition where we saw consistent financial symptoms, especially the long period of deteriorating outcomes before clinical recognition. Our study is the first to provide large-scale quantitative evidence of the medical adage that the first place to look for dementia is in the check book’, he added.