Slow speech, pauses, and use of the same few words.
If you’ve witnessed these habits in an older loved one, it could be an early warning sign of dementia.
New research is beginning to unravel what the natural signs of aging look like and which ones might be due to serious brain conditions related to the way people speak.
For example, forgetting the name of a person or a place or having difficulty finding words is natural and is related to memory recovery, which worsens as we age.
However, this combined with slow or slurred speech, blank pauses and a limited vocabulary can represent a broader impairment, indicating conditions such as dementia and Parkinson’s.
Lawmakers and citizens have called on President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race over concerns about his cognitive health.
That was the conclusion of a University of Toronto A February study involving more than 100 adults between the ages of 18 and 90 found that those who couldn’t quickly verbalize what they were seeing in images were more likely to say the wrong word.
The findings may be seen as timely as lawmakers and voters repeatedly call for President Joe Biden to resign over concerns about his cognitive health.
The 81-year-old endured another disastrous press conference this week, during which he repeatedly misspoke and lost his train of thought.
At one point, he mistakenly referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin.” Then he accidentally called Vice President Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump.”
And in a presidential debate against Donald Trump last month, Biden was left speechless.
“Making sure that we can make every single person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the… with COVID… sorry… dealing with everything we have to do with…” he said before freezing for several seconds.
“Look, we finally beat Medicare,” he continued.
It later emerged that the White House has been visited by a Parkinson’s specialist eight times in the past year, amid speculation that Biden’s speech problems are signs of the brain disorder.
To test whether word-finding difficulty is really an accurate indicator of brain health in older adults, researchers at the University of Toronto looked at 125 healthy adults.
The patients were divided into three groups: young, middle-aged and older.
Young participants had an average age of 26 years, middle-aged participants had an average age of 48 years, and older adults had an average age of 70 years.
The first phase was a “picture-word interference task.” Researchers showed participants pictures of everyday objects (a broom, for example) while playing an audio clip of a related word (such as “mop”) or a similar sound (e.g., “groom”).
The team found that older adults who naturally spoke faster were quicker at correctly naming pictures, suggesting that slower language processing could be a sign of cognitive decline rather than trouble remembering words.
Neurologists also told DailyMail.com that President Biden is showing signs of Parkinson’s disease, such as a stiff gait (seen here).
While this may seem obvious, people’s communication styles change as they age and sometimes it’s nothing to worry about.
For example, word-finding difficulties are something that comes with age. Older people also have subtle changes in their speech, such as speaking more slowly, pausing between words, and a lack of variety in word usage.
But difficulty identifying the word itself from memory, sometimes called the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon, combined with these speech changes, could be a precursor to diseases such as dementia, the researchers warned.
University of Sussex dementia researchers Claire Lancaster and Alice Stanton, who were not involved in the research, wrote for The conversation‘This study highlights the potential of changes in speech rate as a meaningful but subtle marker of cognitive health that could help identify people at risk before more severe symptoms manifest.’
‘This study has opened exciting doors for future research, showing that it is not just what we say but the speed at which we say it that can reveal cognitive changes.’
Biden’s cognitive health has been widely questioned, with neurologists telling DailyMail.com that the president is showing signs of Parkinson’s disease, including speech difficulties and a stiff gait.
Biden, however, maintains he intends to remain in the presidential race, despite growing concerns.