Health

Millions of Adults Have Undiagnosed Mild Cognitive Impairment

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More than 9 in 10 people with mild cognitive impairment don’t realize they have this diagnosis, which can often be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests.

For the study, researchers examined data on about 40 million people ages 65 and older insured by Medicare, the U.S. health insurance program. Overall, only about 8 percent of the eight million cases of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) they expected to find in these health records were actually there. The rest — an estimated 7.4 million cases — were undiagnosed, according to study results published in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease.

“We expected MCI to be underdiagnosed but not by that much,” says lead study author Soeren Mattke, MD, DSc, a professor and director of the Center for Improving Chronic Illness Care at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

This is probably because symptoms like misplacing the car keys or forgetting an appointment can be mild and get dismissed as a normal part of aging, Dr. Mattke says. Beyond this, many clinicians may not prioritize diagnosing these cases, Mattke adds.

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