The anecdotes Lauren Nicholas was hearing were all similarly alarming: People with dementia were experiencing âcatastrophic financial eventsâ â often before they or their loves ones knew there was anything wrong with them.
âOnce you miss a bunch of payments, the bank owns your house or you canât get credit anymore, so I think we were kind of concerned about why this is able to happen,â said Nicholas, a health economist and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Deteriorating financial capabilities have long been considered one of the earliest signs of cognitive decline, but Nicholas noted that experts still had ârelatively limited understanding of how frequent it is and when itâs happening.â