LOS ANGELES: A study of 2,000 elderly people monitored for more than 10 years found that those who developed dementia began to lose an awareness of their own memory abilities several years before being diagnosed.
In addition to taking memory tests, the participants were asked how often they had trouble remembering things and how they would rate their memory compared with 10 years ago. For the 239 people in the group who went on to develop dementia, memory awareness was stable then suddenly fell away sharply 2.6 years before dementia onset.