The Role of Cognitive Tests in Donald Trump’s Memory, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Other Dementia: A Conversation with Dr. Sharon Sha

“As you get older, you have more experience, more control [over] your emotions,” Tan says. So it’s important to not only look at a candidate’s cognitive abilities, he says, but also “their wisdom and the principles that they live by.”

During his presidency, Donald Trump said that he “aced” a test called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment or MoCA. Sha says the screening test is used to flag major deficits and not a comprehensive look at cognitive function.

Sha says that a person’s current cognitive performance needs to be compared against their earlier performance in life. The retired professor may do well on cognitive tests even though he has a significant mental decline.

But Tan says that there is more than just a few seconds of press conference needed to diagnose those conditions, and they need more than an hour of testing.

Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are more common with each passing decade. An estimated 40% of people between 80 and 85 have either dementia, which makes independent living difficult, or what’s known as mild cognitive impairment.

The temporary inability to remember names, in particular, “is very common as we get older,” says Dr. Sharon Sha, a clinical professor of neurology at Stanford University.

Working memory is a cognitive change that occurs when we get older, and it allows us to remember passwords for short periods of time.

A typical person in their 20s might be able to reliably hold seven digits in working memory, Sha says. “As we age, that might diminish to something like six digits, but not zero.”

Dr. Zaldy Tan: Changing “Major” Jobs to “Merger-level Jobs” at Cedars-Sinai

Tan says that it may be a problem for a race car driver or pilot. But it’s less likely to make a difference to someone who is doing “an executive-level job, where there is a lot of support and a lot more time to do planning and decision making.”

One reason for the decline is a decrease in the speed at which the brain processes information. Slower processing means a person may take longer to respond to a question or make a decision.

Dr. Zaldy Tan says that all of them have been at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “It’s just that we are not public figures and therefore this is not as noticeable or blown up.”