If you do this while speaking, you could have symptoms of Alzheimer's before losing your memory, according to science.

A study, published in 2023, supports the processing speed theory, which proposes that a general slowing of cognitive processes, including speaking and thinking more slowly, can predict a specific difficulty in suppressing irrelevant information.

In a disease as devastating as Alzheimer’s, both for those who live with it and for the people around them, understanding and recognizing these warning signs could be more than helpful. It could make a real difference.

Because the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease remain unclear, and may be hidden in the way a person speaks, researchers still do not know exactly which features of speech are most important for diagnosis or for ensuring that diagnosis is accurate.

Dr. Jed Meltzer, Canada Research Chair in Interventional Cognitive Neuroscience at Baycrest and lead author of the study, explains: “Our results show that changes in overall speech rate may reflect changes in the brain. This suggests that speech rate should be assessed as part of standard cognitive evaluations to help doctors detect cognitive decline more quickly and to help older adults take care of their brain health as they age.”

After testing volunteers of different ages, researchers found that some of the strongest indicators of early cognitive decline were how quickly participants could name images and how fast they spoke overall, both of which were linked to executive function. It was not so much about taking longer to find a word or forgetting a name. Instead, the key factor appeared to be speech rate, especially around the pauses people make during conversation.

These findings could help support the development of tools to detect cognitive decline as early as possible, allowing doctors to prescribe interventions that may help patients maintain, or even improve, their brain health as they grow older.

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