Researchers from the University of Southern California School of Medicine, led by Professor Duke Hahn, who published the article in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, experimented with 67 people with an average age of 69 years.
An elderly person’s willingness to give generously to others may not only be a sign of altruism and kindness, but also an early sign of illness. Alzheimer’ssupports a new small american scientific study. The purpose of the study, which showed that generous seniors usually perform significantly worse on cognitive tests, is to help protect them from falling prey to cunning scammers.
Researchers at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, led by Professor Duke Hahn, published the journal in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. experimented with 67 individuals with a mean age of 69 years, who have not been diagnosed with dementia or cognitive impairment (usually a precursor to dementia). Each participant was asked to play an online game with an anonymous person and had to decide how much money to share with the stranger at will and which to keep for himself.
At the same time, the participants underwent neuropsychological tests, which help diagnose an impending Alzheimer’s disease. It was found that those who willingly gave the experiment more money to the unknown were the ones who had the worst cognitive performance based on the tests, and therefore the greatest risk for Alzheimer’s in the future.
The researchers noted, however more research is needed on a larger sample of people to confirm the relationship between so-called economic altruism and the cognitive health of the elderly. However, they stressed that “if a person shows a change in his altruistic behavior, it may be an indication that changes are also occurring in his brain.”
This is something that elderly relatives should keep in mind to protect them from fraud. On the other hand, according to Khan, “The last thing we want is for people to think that financial altruism in the elderly is a bad thing. Of course you can help make your money positive “.
But, he added, “The goal is to understand why some older people may be more vulnerable to fraud and financial exploitation than other peers. “Money problems in general are considered one of the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, and our findings confirm this.”.
