About 6.7 million senior Americans are living with Alzheimer’s dementia in the United States. This number is expected to double in the next 35 years. The cost of Medicare, hospice care and Medicaid long term care reached $345 billion in 2023, while the cost of unpaid caregiving was even higher. These costs will continue grow and tax the resources of both patients and those providing care.
Over the years several elderly women in my family were unexpectedly widowed. My family members predeceased by their husbands suddenly had to deal with life on their own. It did not go well. They stopped making sound financial decisions that they seemingly had been making just prior to their husbands’ deaths. Almost immediately each widow had problems with money. The women were easily manipulated and taken advantage of. It’s probably normal to assume the shock of a life partner dying was enough to send them over the edge into mental disability. However, their declining mental capacity was probably evident prior to their husbands’ deaths but had gone unnoticed. Perhaps their husbands had been covering for them, making decisions or otherwise concealing their declining mental state. I suspect my family’s experience is not unique.
Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows.A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder.What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis.
It makes sense that Alzheimer’s would not onset suddenly. Decision-making begins to deteriorate long before the illness incapacitates its victims. As with most diseases, patients begin to slowly fail and show evidence of disease progression months, if not years, prior to diagnosis. More from The New York Times:
People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease.
Experts warn the onset of dementia isn’t merely a condition where patients get forgetful. Their tolerance for risk changes. One man’s family is suing JP Morgan after he lost $50 million in self-directed investments in the years prior to a dementia diagnosis.
Researchers concede what they found in credit reports is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Many other detrimental behaviors and the effects of poor decision making may not show up in a credit report. These include impulse purchases, speeding tickets, parking tickets, and so on. Odd or other uncharacteristic behaviors can include hoarding, and paying the same bills more than once, while forgetting to pay others at all, losing car keys or trying to use the wrong set of car keys. These could potentially serve as an early warning sign that greater problems lie ahead.
Researchers hope to use the data to possibly identify important variables and develop a predictive algorithm that can be used to flag those in the early stages of dementia much like a credit score flags credit worthiness. Interestingly, there have been other studies that found conditions that foreshadow declining mental capacity appears years before it becomes severe, including changes in vision and analysis of handwriting.
Thanks for an informative and compassionate article.
A related concern is that the elderly are easy prey for financial scammers. They are trusting to telephone con artists and the like.
There is a powerful movie called “I Care A Lot” with Rosemund Pike that is worth watching.