Bruce Willis’ wife revealed this week how the first subtle sign her husband had dementia was problems with his speech, which his family dismissed as part of his lifelong stutter.
Emma Heming Willis, 46, said that while the action movie star had always stuttered, she largely kept it under control thanks to techniques she learned through acting.
But in the months before he was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, he became less “good at covering it up.”
Known as aphasia, the loss of the ability to understand or express speech is often one of the first signs of dementia and appears years before an official diagnosis.
Now, Dr. Stuart Fischer, an internal medicine specialist in New York City, told DailyMail.com that President Joe Biden’s speech patterns are consistent with aphasia.
Dr Fischer said: “Since his recent presidency, he has had many other neurological problems.”
Like Willis, President Biden also stuttered as a child, but he rarely showed it during his 36-year career in the Senate and eight years as vice president.
However, in recent years, Biden has shown signs of deterioration, confusing words, taking long pauses in his speeches and stuttering more dramatically.
Dr. Fischer met Bruce Willis backstage after the actor performed in the Broadway adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery.
Willis starred in box office hits such as Die Hard, Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense. He was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2023, but his family said he had been privately worsening before then.
Concerns about President Biden’s speech have not diminished since he left the presidential debate. The 81-year-old insists he is in perfect health, and White House doctors said his neurological exams showed President Biden “demonstrates excellent fine motor skills.”
More recently, while trying to denounce racist comments made by a comedian at a Trump rally, President Biden stuttered and then called Trump supporters trash.
He said: ‘The only trash I see floating around is his supporters, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and un-American. It is totally contrary to everything we have done, everything we have been.” Since then, his campaign has said as much as President Trump himself.
Heming Willis said city and country that he had seen small changes in his behavior for a long time before he was diagnosed with aphasia in 2022, but it was so subtle and slow that it is difficult to determine when the illness became serious.
‘Bruce has always stuttered, but he has known how to hide it well. As his language started to change, (it seemed like) it was just part of a stutter, it was just Bruce.
“Never in a million years would I have thought that this would be a form of dementia for someone so young.”
The British-American model added: ‘I say the FTD whispers, not shouts. It’s hard for me to say, “This is where Bruce ended up and this is where his illness started to take hold.”
In the spring of 2022, Willis was diagnosed with aphasia.
There are many different causes of aphasia, including strokes, head injuries, and brain tumors.
They can also be the first signs of different types of neurodegenerative diseases, from Alzheimer’s to ALS, or in Willis’ case, frontotemporal dementia.
Dr. Fischer said it appears that Biden appears to be dealing with aphasia, but that it is probably not due to the dementia that Willis suffers from.
He said it could be associated with normal memory loss in old age or another type of dementia, but it’s impossible to diagnose without seeing it in person.
Fischer added: “Usually, as people get older, they develop what’s called vascular dementia.”
‘And that’s definitely a cognitive problem. Memory is lost. Memory can be very bad, people have trouble finding words… these are things we associate with the normal aging process.’
Frontotemporal dementia is a relatively rare form of the disease; It is believed to only affect about 60,000 Americans.
Heming Willis frequently appears at events promoting the disease and said, “It’s an underdog disease, and I don’t know why.” Now I am speaking out and trying to get legislators to listen to the definition of what FTD is and realize that there is a lot of work to do.
It is usually diagnosed in younger people than other dementias. According to the NIH60 percent of people with this condition are between 45 and 64 years old.
Other early symptoms of the disease include apathy, behavioral changes such as increased impulsivity, and problems with decision making.
As the disease progresses, it can deprive people of speech, cause seizures, limit their mobility and prevent them from controlling bodily functions, essentially requiring them to be on bed rest, according to Athena Healthcare Group.
Because the disease is rare, it has not been studied enough and there are no treatments for it.
Once someone is diagnosed, they can live more than 10 years with the disease or, in some cases, less than two years, dying from other conditions such as pneumonia, infection or a fall.
President Biden has not been diagnosed with any neurodegenerative disease, yet critics have long raised concerns that he is mentally fit to hold executive office.
These concerns arose among the public in June when President Biden debated former President Donald Trump.
Over the course of the 90-minute debate, President Biden appeared to lose his train of thought and struggled to find the right words several times.
He also spoke in long, disjointed sentences that on several occasions made little sense.
This sparked a maelstrom of criticism about his physical condition, which likely contributed to his decision to drop out of the presidential race in July.
In recent appearances, President Biden has had similar problems with his speeches. In an October 25 speech at the Gila River Indian Community, Arizona, he had difficulty pronouncing the community’s name.
The Delaware native has refused to publicly perform cognitive testing and has refuted all suggestions of mental decline.
White House representatives said the president had seen a neurologist three times in connection with an annual physical exam for someone his age, and that his results indicated he was in good cognitive health.
However, authorities such as Alzheimer’s Society Keep in mind that only a clinical evaluation by a qualified doctor can diagnose someone with dementia.
The organization said: “it is correct that voters can discuss a candidate’s perceived physical and mental fitness for such an important role, it is not correct to speculate that someone specifically has dementia or a mental health condition.”