“If we can identify people who have Alzheimer’s brewing before they have symptoms, we can treat the disease sooner,” says Jason Brandt, director of the Division of Medical Psychology and creator of the assessment. “If we could delay the onset of symptoms by five years, we could reduce the number of people with Alzheimer’s by half.”

The anonymous questionnaire gathers information about risk factors, including age, family history, physical health and lifestyle. The brief memory test evaluates a person’s ability to learn new word pairs. 

Test takers receive feedback from the assessment, including a comparison of their memory test score to others of the same age and gender, information on the likelihood that the individual will develop an illness that causes dementia, and personalized suggestions for maintaining brain health.

After launching the assessment with grant funding in 2009, Brandt completed studies to see how its results compared to diagnoses based on brain imaging, bloodwork, cognitive tests, and neurologic and psychiatric exams. He found people diagnosed with dementia through a clinical evaluation scored lowest on the memory test. Those with mild cognitive impairment scored between patients with dementia and those without any impairment.

In 2015, Brandt launched an updated version of the assessment, which includes additional risk factors, such as smoking and alcohol consumption. He hopes to conduct a long-term study of people who take the test, a number that has already surpassed 10,000.