Aging brain influences financial decision making, says report
- October 20, 2015, 6:43 pm
- Breaking News
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QUETTA: A new report says doctors and consumers both tend to overlook one of the most common and devastating problems of aging — the decline in patients' ability to manage their own financial affairs.
The first step to fixing this problem is giving it a name, according to Dr. Mark Lachs of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and Duke Han of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, coauthors of the report, who want to describe the condition as "age-associated financial vulnerability."
"It is my hope that by coining this term — age-associated financial vulnerability — it will begin to get physicians to think about this in all older people with and without cognitive problems in the same way they have begun to ask about advanced directives and driving safety as people age," Lachs said by email.
Writing in Annals of Internal Medicine, Lachs and Han define age-associated financial vulnerability as a pattern of risky behavior related to money that places an older adult at substantial risk for a considerable loss of resources that might result in dramatic changes in their quality of life and is inconsistent with choices the person made when they were younger.
Doctors need to understand how the aging brain, with or without neurological disease, influences financial decision-making, because elderly patients may not have earned income or a long enough investment horizon to recover from losses, Lachs said.
Financial exploitation is also the most common form of elder abuse, accounting for about half of cases, and this in turn can lead to bad health outcomes including depression, nursing home placement and increased mortality, he added.
Factors that can contribute to financial vulnerability among the elderly include cognitive or emotional decline; impairments in vision, hearing or mobility; serious progressive illness; and social isolation. Certain diseases and medications can also hasten cognitive decline and make it harder for older adults to manage their money.
