The results of the study showed that older adults who choose to give away a larger portion of their money also tended to demonstrate poorer performance on cognitive assessments.

A new study from the University of Southern California and Bar-Ilan University suggests that individuals who are willing to give away larger-than-usual amounts of their own money may be suffering the initial stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, evaluated the relationship between altruism and cognitive function in a sample of dementia-free older persons. The study’s primary objective was to identify those most vulnerable to financial exploitation and identify effective strategies for safeguarding them.

The study’s findings revealed that elderly people who chose to give away a bigger amount of their money performed worse on cognitive assessments designed to diagnose early Alzheimer’s disease.

A total of 67 persons were chosen to participate in the study, with a median age of 69.21. 41.8 percent were men and 58.2 percent were women among the participants.

The study, which was directed by Prof. Duke Han of the University of Southern California and Dr. Gali Weissberger of the Interdisciplinary Department of Social Sciences at Bar-Ilan University, used a behavioral economic measure of financial altruism with actual monetary outcomes to evaluate the participants.

For a more reliable outcome, they informed participants that any charitable contributions they made would be deducted from their study income.

Each participant was told that $10 had been set aside for them and that they could send an anonymous person any amount between $0 and $10.

Any money beyond the $10 would be added to their earnings for the course. They were told to choose ten options in $1 increments to submit to the unidentified individual. According to the study, someone who opted to contribute $0 would be deemed the least altruistic, while someone who elected to send $10 would be rated the most altruistic.

Participants in the second phase of the study underwent a battery of neuropsychological tests including a variety of domains, such as memory evaluations, executive functioning tests, language tests, attention tests, and working memory tests.

After the evaluations, the sample group was split into three groups: “Gave More,” “Gave Less,” and “Gave Equally.”

People who provided more than half of their money to the anonymous donor were placed in the “Gave More” group, while those who kept more than half of their earnings and donated less than half were placed in the “Gave Less” group. The folks who kept $5 for themselves and distributed $5 to others made up the “Gave Equally” group.

After separating the participants into groups, the researchers revealed that each member of the “Gave More” group had donated the entire $10 to the anonymous recipient, keeping none for themselves.

When the researchers compared the results of the money experiment to the results of the neuropsychological assessments, they discovered that giving away more money was associated with poor performance on a variety of cognitive tests such as story recall, word list learning and recall, and semantic fluency.

Overall, all participants who performed poorly on the cognitive examination belonged to the “Gave More” group.

This study is the first to demonstrate a direct negative association between self-reported altruistic conduct and cognitive abilities, despite earlier studies showing positive relationships between the two.

Weissberger emphasized the significance of the study by saying that altruism “plays an important role in financial decision making, a function critical for preventing financial exploitation.”

“Additionally, a growing body of literature suggests that declines in financial decision-making in older adulthood may be an early sign of adverse cognitive outcomes associated with Alzheimer’s disease.” “The findings of this study,” according to the author, “provide insights into how some adults may become vulnerable to financial exploitation in older age.”

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