How would you feel about being screened for dementia on a regular basis? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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About half of people who have dementia don’t know it, and those people are at risk for worse outcomes when they’re hospitalized. That’s according to research by Halima Amjad, a geriatrics and dementia expert at Johns Hopkins. Amjad says this points to the need to screen for dementia in primary care settings and elsewhere.

Amjad: As someone who works in this space my bias is towards that idea that doing this, it does start to normalize that there is unfortunately still a lot of stigma around memory loss and dementia and so just normalizing those discussions around brain health can help to normalize it reduce the stigma and help us in prevention efforts, because we know there's more and more research pointing to we need to be more proactive in midlife as we're getting older to prevent cognitive changes and dementia later on and I think normalizing those discussions bringing it into mainstream medical care is an important piece of that . :34

Amjad notes that very brief screens have been developed. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.