Our experience with dementing illness highlighted the importance of being aware of the mental status of family members.
As it is today, people can (and routinely do) just drift down and down in their cognitive ability until they reach the point that when they are asked on the MMSE where they are, they might reply the Milky Way. While this answer might be technically true, it is nonetheless fairly startling to realize that people can sink that far into dementia without apparent notice.
It should not necessarily assumed that family doctors would have a much greater insight into such psychometric evaluation. In our experience, our family doctor apparently was unaware of the diagnosis long after it was obvious to other family members. If you simply let the subtle signals slide, then diagnosis can be delayed until their is relatively advanced cognitive decline present. Of course, the clinical relevance of a diagnosis is somewhat unclear when no effective treatments are available.
However, with the approaching wave of treatments that are emerging, being more aware of mental status will be crucial. Those in mainstream society will need to be highly aware of their mental status and seek treatment as early as they can when they detect a change in status.
Fortunately, there is a neuropsych package (url below) that could be used for early detection. It would be better if there were a professionally designed package for this purpose (hopefully this will emerge), though until that is available, those on forum might find it helpful to investigate the programs available on PEBL. These programs should give a much better sense of mental status than questions such as "Where are you?". There are ~70 different programs; some of them are more sensitive to Alzheimer's than others. Those interested might post their results online so that we could do our own standardization. It would b especially helpful if posters could also post their MMSE scores (if known). This effort could be of significant importance. Often in published studies there might be <100 patients\controls. With the large numbers of lurkers and posters that are attracted to this site we might be able to do much better than that. The great part of this is that many of the programs on PEBL are actually quite a bit of fun. If we find some good programs for AD, then people might want to retake the test every month to chart their mental functioning. With millisecond accuracy, one could develop a sense of medium term trends in one's cognitive ability.
http://pebl.sourceforge.net/
