Should people have an annual brain health check-up?

Many of us have yearly appointments for cholesterol or other standard tests, but few have a regular brain assessment. Alvaro Fernandez explains why annual brain health check-ups are a good idea.

Transcript

00:00

The way today we diagnose all kinds of cognitive and emotional health disorders, maybe this is going to be in camera.

00:07

It's a joke. It makes no sense. [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:15

I think so. So the annual physical, everyone gets the point. You just need a baseline to compare yourself over time.

00:22

And the logic, we do a lot of surveys and market research as part of what we do as an organization.

00:29

And we have realized that people are eager to have some kind of objective measure of how the brain evolves.

00:35

Because right now, it's all subjective. And that's what consumers, to be proactive, to be managing their own brain health, need better access to.

00:43

So one reason is from the pure self, personal health perspective. The other one is as a system.

00:50

The way today we diagnose all kinds of cognitive and emotional health disorders, maybe this is going to be in camera.

00:57

It's a joke. It makes no sense. We're comparing people against a norm of people at same age group.

01:04

But there's a huge variability. The way that we should measure it is intraindividual, is how that person was five years ago, how two years ago.

01:13

And then if there's a significant decline, either in cognitive or emotional function, well, that issues red flags.

01:20

So the checkup every year would provide that intelligence, both at the individual level you can compare

01:27

and at the population level, it would really help analyze what are the predictive factors of who

01:34

is going to be more likely to develop depression or suicide or Alzheimer's and how people can respond

01:42

to different medicaments, to different therapies, to different interventions. Without that annual baseline, I think