Dr. Sandra Weintraub

However, if you look at who's at the bottom and who's at the top, you have a huge spread across that average.

I don't know if you know what the standard deviation is,

but it's kind of variation around a mean.

So when you take 30-year-olds and you do that test, their standard deviation is much, much smaller.

If you take 80-year-olds, it's huge.

So it means that there are people at the top of that standard deviation that are performing like 30-year-olds.

So I don't believe in normal aging.

For me, there's no such thing as normal aging.

Now, how do you tell if somebody is really having problems?

And when you use the word dementia, we don't talk about dementia.

We talk about cognitive impairment because there are stages.

So you can start off with what's called mild cognitive impairment.

And if this is neurodegenerative, it keeps going over time and it

eventually turns into a dementia, which means that you have cognitive impairment so severe that you can no longer function in your daily life.

A lot of people have mild cognitive impairment and they're fine daily.

They can drive, they can do finances.

They're just a little annoyed by their memory loss.

But when it gets to the point where you're not remembering things, you're mispaying bills, you're forgetting where you're going when you're driving, that's what we call dementia.

Okay, so that takes me back to the early 1990s when I was at Harvard and a group of me and my colleagues were engaged by the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions.

I was in neuropsychology at the time.