Falling for financial scams? It could be a sign of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease

Older adults, who are more vulnerable to financial scams, may have brain changes linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a first-of-its-kind study by researchers at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Nearly 7 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, the fifth leading cause of death among people aged 65 and older. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that the disease will cost an estimated $360 billion in health care costs this year alone.

Researchers led by Duke Han, professor of psychology and family medicine at USC Dornsife, sought to better understand the link between early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and financial vulnerability by using high-powered MRI to examine the brains of 97 study participants over the age of 50.

The scientists focused on the entorhinal cortex, a region that serves as a relay between the hippocampus, the brain’s learning and memory center, and the medial prefrontal cortex, which regulates emotion, motivation and other cognitive functions. It is often the first region to show changes in Alzheimer’s disease, typically becoming thinner as the disease progresses.

None of the study participants, aged 52 to 83, showed clinical signs of cognitive impairment, but all underwent MRI scans to measure the thickness of their entorhinal cortex.

Additionally, the researchers used a standardized tool called the Perceived Financial Vulnerability Scale (PFVS) to assess participants’ financial awareness and susceptibility to poor financial decisions, which they call “financial exploitation vulnerability,” or FEV.

By comparing adults’ FEV1 with the thickness of their entorhinal cortex, Han and his team found a significant correlation: People who were more vulnerable to financial scams had thinner entorhinal cortexes.

This was especially true for participants aged 70 and older. Previous research has linked FEV1 to mild cognitive impairment, dementia and some molecular brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Han, who holds a joint appointment at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, says the findings provide crucial evidence supporting the idea that FEV1 could be a new clinical tool for detecting cognitive changes in older adults, changes that are often difficult to detect.

“Assessing financial vulnerability in older adults could help identify those in the early stages of mild cognitive impairment or dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease,” Han said. However, he added that financial vulnerability alone is not a definitive indicator of Alzheimer’s disease or other cognitive decline. “But FEV1 assessment could be part of a broader risk profile,” he added.

Han also noted several limitations of the study. Most participants were older, white, and highly educated women, making it difficult to generalize the results to a more diverse population. Additionally, while the study found a link between entorhinal cortex thickness and FEV1, it did not prove it. Finally, the study did not include specific measures of Alzheimer’s disease pathology.

These limitations leave open the possibility that the relationship between FEV1 and entorhinal cortex thinning could be explained by other factors. Therefore, Han said that further research, including long-term studies in diverse populations, is needed before FEV1 can be considered a reliable cognitive assessment tool.

The work is published in the journal Cerebral cortex.

In addition to Han, the study’s authors include Laura Fenton, Aaron Lim, Jenna Axelrod and Daisy Noriega-Makarskyy of USC Dornsife; Lauren Salminen, Hussein Yassine and Laura Mosqueda of the Keck School of Medicine of USC; Gali Weissberger of Bar-Ilan University in Israel; and Annie Nguyen of the University of California, San Diego.