If you haven’t yet dealt with the challenge of a client showing signs of diminished mental capacity, you will. And now is the time to prepare for that event, before you see the signs.
Amy Florian can deliver the alarming statistics on the likelihood that your clients — and you — will face that dreaded development associated with aging, but in an interview she also provided the steps an advisor should take, and when to take action, well before diminished capacity becomes a problem for your client and her family and your compliance department.
|18 different diseases can lead to dementia
First, the sobering statistics. Florian, CEO of the consulting firm Corgenius, which specializes in educating businesspeople on death and dying, ‘transitions’ and how to serve older clients, reports that one in nine people age 65 or older have some form of dementia, as do almost half of people age 85 or older.
There are 18 different diseases that can lead to dementia, with Alzheimer’s disease by far the leading cause, followed by vascular dementia. However, one common misconception is that Alzheimer’s and dementia are the same thing. They are not; you can have dementia and not have Alzheimer’s, but if you suffer from Alzheimer’s you do have dementia.
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James J. Green
Jamie Green is editor of Jamie Green Reports, an advisor-focused writing, editing and shepherding service. He can be reached at [email protected]. Jamie is former Group Editorial Director of the Investment Advisory Group at ALM Media, where he had overall editorial responsibility for ThinkAdvisor.com and Investment Advisor and Research on Wealth magazines, monthly print magazines that have served advisors of all kinds for more than 30 years. In more than 30 years of experience in print and electronic journalism, Jamie has been covering the investment advisory industry since 1999. In the 1990s he worked for nine years at The New York Times, where he was editor of TimesFax, an electronic version of the newspaper of record now known as TimesDigest. In the 1980s he was editor of Tele/Scope, a pioneering electronic news service based in New York, and was editor of Telecommunications Research, a monthly journal. He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from St. Hyacinth College in Granby, Massachusetts, and studied theology on the graduate level at St. Anthony-on-the-Hudson, Rensselaer, New York.
