Failure to recognise famous faces an early sign of dementia, study suggests

Asking people to identify pictures of famous people could help to highlight early signs of one type of dementia in half of patients, according to US researchers. Doctors currently use simple mental agility tests to screen for the condition, but experts from Northwestern University in Chicago believe a face recognition test should be used too. The research showed that people with early onset primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a rare form of dementia, struggled to identify black and white prints of 20 famous people, including Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King. Nuances and differences in dementia Compared with 27 dementia-free volunteers,