Dr. Sandra Weintraub

I'd been creating tests, and they wanted us to create a little screening test on a computer that we could use to screen physicians over the age of 65 to identify those who might be having cognitive impairment that might then lead to them dying.

doing malpractice.

So that was very exciting.

And we got together and we designed a very lovely test, which I'll tell you what happened to it later.

And we then tested over a thousand physicians ranging in age from 28 to over 92 in different age levels.

And what we found was what every other cognitive aging study has found, that if you go from 20 to 30, 30 to 40, 40 to 50, all the way up over 80, the average score goes down, down, down, down, down.

But the standard deviation goes up, up, up, up, up.

And so in that study, we thought, oh, let's look at the top people over the age of 65.

I think we had 20 people who were at the top and 20 people at the bottom of that distribution that we compared to each other.

And we said, okay, there's got to be, you know, what are they doing?

Well,

The only thing that differentiated them was that the ones in the top group were continuing to work, but that's kind of a double-edged sword because maybe they had already started developing cognitive impairment and couldn't work.

But in all other respects, there were no differences.

They took the same medications.

They had the same illnesses.

It was and that's really what got me fired up about we want it.

You know, we're focusing so much on this average and on the not average, the below average.

Let's see what you know, what's what's keeping these guys at the top up there.

And so the way the test ended up, by the way, was that the Harvard medical institutions didn't really want to institute that kind of screening testing, which you can understand.

I mean, it's not, I'm not, I'm not disparaging it because in some ways it's not fair.