10 ms·

Seeking early signals of dementia in driving and credit scores

82 points by tysone 5y ago

vmception 5y ago
Regarding the credit scores study, this may not have to do with forgetting payments as a precursor to dementia, it may have to do with costly medical issues that was the precursor to dementia which caused the financial stress
- Cipater 5y ago
  1
jacobkg 5y ago
My grandmother had very serious dementia. I remember a year or so before we were aware of it that she almost ran a cyclist off the road which was very uncharacteristic.
- Baeocystin 5y ago
  One of the early signs that foreshadowed my mother's decline was the deterioration of her driving skills, and this preceded almost all other noticeable symptoms. Driving is a complex skill that requires rapid, continuous sensory integration to perform well. It makes sense to me that it is something that would first show a deficit.
- ben_w 5y ago
  One of the early signs in both my mother’s and grandmother’s Alzheimer’s was forgetting to pay (UK) road tax. Somehow both of them managed to get away with being on the road for the next six months, before the rest of the family found out and intervened. At least in my mother’s case, this was far from the only thing that suddenly became wrong with her driving; she also developed a fear of going over about 50 mph and using gears above third, and one sign we only recognised in retrospect was that she forgot how maps worked.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>Regarding the credit scores study, this may not have to do with forgetting payments as a precursor to dementia, or my ADHD regularly costing me late fees. I'm ok with it until some company turns out to be just as disorganized as me, because they never have to pay for their foibles.
- echelon 5y ago
  > ADHD regularly costing me late fees The world is set up against us. That, and the fact that the world revolves around morning people. I'm still writing code at 3 AM, and you want me to be up for a 10:00 meeting? I'm lucky to be in a career where I can avoid this stuff, but it doesn't fix the rest of the rigidly broken world.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bspammer 5y ago
    When I was a teenager I was really hoping that when I grew up I would stop being sleepy in the morning and then becoming wide awake around 11pm. Hasn’t changed at all. Everyone’s got some way that society doesn’t work for them though. Being left handed, too short, too tall, a minority, wheelchair-bound etc. All things considered I have it pretty good.
    - steve_adams_86 5y ago
      Yeah, 100% - my dull brain has somehow managed to give me a relatively comfortable life. Plenty of problems crop up but I've got food, a family, a job. I used to resent this brain quite a bit but I've come to like it a lot. It could have been worse.
  - steve_adams_86 5y ago
    One thing I've found profoundly useful is not thinking of the world as set up against me, but more so that I'm my own worst enemy. I'm set up against myself. Nothing external will change, so there's no sense fretting about my environment naturally suiting my psychology, because that'll never happen. That's a fantasy. I'd code til 3am too (and have, far too many times) but I've come to believe my job in the present is all about setting up future me for success. Present me tends to have shitty ideas about what to do in the present, but plenty of great ideas about what I should have done in the past or should do in the future. Without being critical of present me, I'm likely to fuck things up properly. I need to focus on the scaffolding for those great ideas for future me and less on the shitty ones for present me. That guy is already a lost cause. My strategy is one of delayed gratification, which my brain hates. I lay down with a book at 9 or 10pm because it'll put me to sleep in a hurry even though my brain is typically WIRED when I lay down. Yeah it doesn't feel like bed time, but it sure as shit is bed time. I'll do other things like keep shitty food out of my home, because otherwise I'll find really good reasons to eat (too much) of it. I put EVERYTHING in my calendar because although present me is positive future me will remember, that's totally incorrect and I actually do need frequent reminders of pretty much everything I'm not immediately focused on or interested in. I leave my phone behind because even though I'm sure I won't use it too much, yeah, I definitely will. Expect the worst from yourself and prepare accordingly. So, the world isn't my problem, I am! I'm my worst enemy. The path to defeating myself is doing a lot of stuff I don't feel like doing. I like this approach because rather than being mad at the world for my failures, I'm forced to do something about it. That's my experience, anyway.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/x5U1H https://archive.is/x5U1H
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
I was part of a project to measure reaction times in a primitive driving simulator. Accelerator, brake, steering wheel from a gaming setup. You drove down a straight road, some roadside scenery went by. Every so often you went through a gate. The gate would sometimes close just as you got there. Measured whether you hit the brake in time. Simple, a little challenging. The idea was, for drivers to self-measure if they were still able to drive safely. Tried to pitch it to an insurance company that rhymes with Slate Charm. They acted like it was poison. They didn't want to even appear to be trying to select out older customers. The legal trouble they'd have, discriminating according to age (or even appearing to try) would have brought a landslide down on them.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Could be a market for BMVs since they're responsible for license renewal. And they already test eye sight.
- MontyCarloHall 5y ago
  Huh, if they can legally justify explicitly discriminating based on sex and age (younger men generally pay more than younger women, while older women generally pay more than older men) I’m surprised they couldn’t figure out a way to discriminate based on age alone. Edit: here [0] is a breakdown of car insurance costs, stratified by age/sex. Young people pay by far the most, with premiums steadily declining until age 50 and then rising again. So I’m not sure what their objection might have been, since they already do charge old people more (presumably at a level accurately reflecting their relative risk). [0] https://www.valuepenguin.com/how-age-affects-auto-insurance-costs https://www.valuepenguin.com/how-age-affects-auto-insurance-...
  - scottlamb 5y ago
    Worse: couldn't figure out a way to "discriminate" based on a bona fide measure of driving ability that (I imagine) only loosely correlates with age. But age discrimination laws/enforcement are seemingly one-way, and the elderly vote and sue, so...
  - 5y ago
ImaCake 5y ago
A word of caution about machine learning models in academia. The advertised predictive ability or AUC is often inflated, sometimes by a lot. I am not sure why, but I imagine it comes down to the usual p-hacking incentives. Maybe it is because you only need to apply your model to more than one "independent" dataset before you publish a paper. Or simply that academics in diverse fields often lack the nuanced knowledge to realise their model is predicting based on some experimental artifact in their data. Digital phenotyping has a lot of promise. But considering the unusually conservative old boys club that seems to dominate alzheimers research I would be particularly suspicious of any research on the disease.
- timy2shoes 5y ago
  Fantastic point. Another thing about academic ml models is that they're commonly evaluated on in-sample data. For example, medical AI devices are commonly evaluated on data coming from the same source/hospital that the training data comes from (see https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/How.Medical.AI_.Devices.Are_.Evaluated.pdf https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/...). This leads to over-confidence in the performance because of overfitting of batch effects.
- dataangel 5y ago
  > But considering the unusually conservative old boys club that seems to dominate alzheimers research This seems like an interesting claim, worth substantiating? For someone with no knowledge of the field.
  - ImaCake 5y ago
    Sure, there's a bit of a phenonemon where a small group of labs come to dominate a field of research through a positive feedback loop. They have some initial success, and then can get funding, they then have increased resources to effectively lobby for more funding, squeezing out other groups. Often leading scientists have a lot of influence over the grant funding bodies, but my understanding of these politics is murky. Often this isn't too problematic, but the Alzheimer's field seems really hell bent on the beta-amyloid thing which looks good on the surface but every drug they have tried (and many have been tried) hasn't worked in practice. Here's a nature news article [0] discussing the beta-amyloid failed drugs story. You will note quotes from leading researchers from Harvard and other prestigious institutes still defending drugs against beta-amyloid despite the history of failure. These leading labs should be looking at different tactics, but the quotes seem to suggest that as of 2018 these groups were still intent on the same strategy despite the failures. 0. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
I'm curious if driving in particular could predict other things, like ADHD / bipolar. Having had a few friends on the spectrum, it definitely felt like their driving patterns were quite different than other people on the road.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  I am curious. There may very well be patterns. Like that recent article where an algorithm could guess the ethnicity of patients from X-rays, such patterns may very well be present in driving
- huge87 5y ago
  What did you observe in your friends' driving patterns that was different? I'm very curious.
  - Ozzie_osman 5y ago
    Eg for bipolar, during the manic phase (or what I assume was the manic phase) the driving was more erratic while during depressive phase it was pretty calm. In general it felt like three things swung wildly between manic/depressive: sleep (more sleep when depressive), driving (more erratic during manic), and weight (higher weight when depressive). Very small sample size and I'm in no way qualified in this topic, it's just observation.
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
I had a commanding officer in the military who was showing signs of dementia. He was making… let’s say, very bad tactical decisions. In the game way past his prime. But this was a whole different level. We were going to let his family know but it turns out it was becoming obvious in other areas. He was doing weird things like leaving doors open, eating a lot of sweets, and being paranoid about washing his hands all the time. Not a good scenario, really crazy condition. Sad for the people that got left to deal with him.
- salt-thrower 5y ago
  What procedures does the military have in place for when a high-ranking officer's mental acuity takes a steep dive? I'm curious about how that plays out.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Formally, the Disability Evaluation System. In my case, it was immediately obvious that this guy was falling apart. In about one month things went from fine, to amazingly bad. Everyone saw it, even the people that didn't want to had to admit something was up.
giantg2 5y ago
This other article about writing style risks is interesting. If it's accurate, then I will probably have early onset alzheimer's. I miss articles, misspell, and repeat words. I'm only in my 30s... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/health/alzheimers-prediction-speech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/health/alzheimers-predict...
- apple4ever 5y ago
  Oh wow that is helpful for me. My grandfather had Alzheimers, and my mother (his daughter) had frontotemperal dementia. So I know I'm at risk. This was a good article towards maybe helping out some research even if it doesn't help me specifically.
apple4ever 5y ago
This would be great. My mother had Fronto-temporal dementia, and her father (my grandfather) had Alzheimers. So after she passed for it, the fact I might get it has been heavily weighing on my mind. I've looked for various things to "test" myself, and notice things about me that might be nothing but also might be something. To be able to get a risk factor would at least either let me worry less, or have an answer that it is in a percent of likelihood.

82 points by tysone 5y ago

Regarding the credit scores study, this may not have to do with forgetting payments as a precursor to dementia, it may have to do with costly medical issues that was the precursor to dementia which caused the financial stress

Cipater 5y ago
1

jacobkg 5y ago

My grandmother had very serious dementia. I remember a year or so before we were aware of it that she almost ran a cyclist off the road which was very uncharacteristic.

Baeocystin 5y ago
One of the early signs that foreshadowed my mother's decline was the deterioration of her driving skills, and this preceded almost all other noticeable symptoms. Driving is a complex skill that requires rapid, continuous sensory integration to perform well. It makes sense to me that it is something that would first show a deficit.
ben_w 5y ago
One of the early signs in both my mother’s and grandmother’s Alzheimer’s was forgetting to pay (UK) road tax. Somehow both of them managed to get away with being on the road for the next six months, before the rest of the family found out and intervened. At least in my mother’s case, this was far from the only thing that suddenly became wrong with her driving; she also developed a fear of going over about 50 mph and using gears above third, and one sign we only recognised in retrospect was that she forgot how maps worked.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>Regarding the credit scores study, this may not have to do with forgetting payments as a precursor to dementia, or my ADHD regularly costing me late fees. I'm ok with it until some company turns out to be just as disorganized as me, because they never have to pay for their foibles.

echelon 5y ago
> ADHD regularly costing me late fees The world is set up against us. That, and the fact that the world revolves around morning people. I'm still writing code at 3 AM, and you want me to be up for a 10:00 meeting? I'm lucky to be in a career where I can avoid this stuff, but it doesn't fix the rest of the rigidly broken world.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bspammer 5y ago
  When I was a teenager I was really hoping that when I grew up I would stop being sleepy in the morning and then becoming wide awake around 11pm. Hasn’t changed at all. Everyone’s got some way that society doesn’t work for them though. Being left handed, too short, too tall, a minority, wheelchair-bound etc. All things considered I have it pretty good.
  - steve_adams_86 5y ago
    Yeah, 100% - my dull brain has somehow managed to give me a relatively comfortable life. Plenty of problems crop up but I've got food, a family, a job. I used to resent this brain quite a bit but I've come to like it a lot. It could have been worse.
- steve_adams_86 5y ago
  One thing I've found profoundly useful is not thinking of the world as set up against me, but more so that I'm my own worst enemy. I'm set up against myself. Nothing external will change, so there's no sense fretting about my environment naturally suiting my psychology, because that'll never happen. That's a fantasy. I'd code til 3am too (and have, far too many times) but I've come to believe my job in the present is all about setting up future me for success. Present me tends to have shitty ideas about what to do in the present, but plenty of great ideas about what I should have done in the past or should do in the future. Without being critical of present me, I'm likely to fuck things up properly. I need to focus on the scaffolding for those great ideas for future me and less on the shitty ones for present me. That guy is already a lost cause. My strategy is one of delayed gratification, which my brain hates. I lay down with a book at 9 or 10pm because it'll put me to sleep in a hurry even though my brain is typically WIRED when I lay down. Yeah it doesn't feel like bed time, but it sure as shit is bed time. I'll do other things like keep shitty food out of my home, because otherwise I'll find really good reasons to eat (too much) of it. I put EVERYTHING in my calendar because although present me is positive future me will remember, that's totally incorrect and I actually do need frequent reminders of pretty much everything I'm not immediately focused on or interested in. I leave my phone behind because even though I'm sure I won't use it too much, yeah, I definitely will. Expect the worst from yourself and prepare accordingly. So, the world isn't my problem, I am! I'm my worst enemy. The path to defeating myself is doing a lot of stuff I don't feel like doing. I like this approach because rather than being mad at the world for my failures, I'm forced to do something about it. That's my experience, anyway.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/x5U1H https://archive.is/x5U1H

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

I was part of a project to measure reaction times in a primitive driving simulator. Accelerator, brake, steering wheel from a gaming setup. You drove down a straight road, some roadside scenery went by. Every so often you went through a gate. The gate would sometimes close just as you got there. Measured whether you hit the brake in time. Simple, a little challenging. The idea was, for drivers to self-measure if they were still able to drive safely. Tried to pitch it to an insurance company that rhymes with Slate Charm. They acted like it was poison. They didn't want to even appear to be trying to select out older customers. The legal trouble they'd have, discriminating according to age (or even appearing to try) would have brought a landslide down on them.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
Could be a market for BMVs since they're responsible for license renewal. And they already test eye sight.
MontyCarloHall 5y ago
Huh, if they can legally justify explicitly discriminating based on sex and age (younger men generally pay more than younger women, while older women generally pay more than older men) I’m surprised they couldn’t figure out a way to discriminate based on age alone. Edit: here [0] is a breakdown of car insurance costs, stratified by age/sex. Young people pay by far the most, with premiums steadily declining until age 50 and then rising again. So I’m not sure what their objection might have been, since they already do charge old people more (presumably at a level accurately reflecting their relative risk). [0] https://www.valuepenguin.com/how-age-affects-auto-insurance-costs https://www.valuepenguin.com/how-age-affects-auto-insurance-...
- scottlamb 5y ago
  Worse: couldn't figure out a way to "discriminate" based on a bona fide measure of driving ability that (I imagine) only loosely correlates with age. But age discrimination laws/enforcement are seemingly one-way, and the elderly vote and sue, so...
- 5y ago

ImaCake 5y ago

A word of caution about machine learning models in academia. The advertised predictive ability or AUC is often inflated, sometimes by a lot. I am not sure why, but I imagine it comes down to the usual p-hacking incentives. Maybe it is because you only need to apply your model to more than one "independent" dataset before you publish a paper. Or simply that academics in diverse fields often lack the nuanced knowledge to realise their model is predicting based on some experimental artifact in their data. Digital phenotyping has a lot of promise. But considering the unusually conservative old boys club that seems to dominate alzheimers research I would be particularly suspicious of any research on the disease.

timy2shoes 5y ago
Fantastic point. Another thing about academic ml models is that they're commonly evaluated on in-sample data. For example, medical AI devices are commonly evaluated on data coming from the same source/hospital that the training data comes from (see https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/How.Medical.AI_.Devices.Are_.Evaluated.pdf https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/...). This leads to over-confidence in the performance because of overfitting of batch effects.
dataangel 5y ago
> But considering the unusually conservative old boys club that seems to dominate alzheimers research This seems like an interesting claim, worth substantiating? For someone with no knowledge of the field.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  Sure, there's a bit of a phenonemon where a small group of labs come to dominate a field of research through a positive feedback loop. They have some initial success, and then can get funding, they then have increased resources to effectively lobby for more funding, squeezing out other groups. Often leading scientists have a lot of influence over the grant funding bodies, but my understanding of these politics is murky. Often this isn't too problematic, but the Alzheimer's field seems really hell bent on the beta-amyloid thing which looks good on the surface but every drug they have tried (and many have been tried) hasn't worked in practice. Here's a nature news article [0] discussing the beta-amyloid failed drugs story. You will note quotes from leading researchers from Harvard and other prestigious institutes still defending drugs against beta-amyloid despite the history of failure. These leading labs should be looking at different tactics, but the quotes seem to suggest that as of 2018 these groups were still intent on the same strategy despite the failures. 0. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

I'm curious if driving in particular could predict other things, like ADHD / bipolar. Having had a few friends on the spectrum, it definitely felt like their driving patterns were quite different than other people on the road.

N1H1L 5y ago
I am curious. There may very well be patterns. Like that recent article where an algorithm could guess the ethnicity of patients from X-rays, such patterns may very well be present in driving
huge87 5y ago
What did you observe in your friends' driving patterns that was different? I'm very curious.
- Ozzie_osman 5y ago
  Eg for bipolar, during the manic phase (or what I assume was the manic phase) the driving was more erratic while during depressive phase it was pretty calm. In general it felt like three things swung wildly between manic/depressive: sleep (more sleep when depressive), driving (more erratic during manic), and weight (higher weight when depressive). Very small sample size and I'm in no way qualified in this topic, it's just observation.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

I had a commanding officer in the military who was showing signs of dementia. He was making… let’s say, very bad tactical decisions. In the game way past his prime. But this was a whole different level. We were going to let his family know but it turns out it was becoming obvious in other areas. He was doing weird things like leaving doors open, eating a lot of sweets, and being paranoid about washing his hands all the time. Not a good scenario, really crazy condition. Sad for the people that got left to deal with him.

salt-thrower 5y ago
What procedures does the military have in place for when a high-ranking officer's mental acuity takes a steep dive? I'm curious about how that plays out.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  Formally, the Disability Evaluation System. In my case, it was immediately obvious that this guy was falling apart. In about one month things went from fine, to amazingly bad. Everyone saw it, even the people that didn't want to had to admit something was up.

giantg2 5y ago

This other article about writing style risks is interesting. If it's accurate, then I will probably have early onset alzheimer's. I miss articles, misspell, and repeat words. I'm only in my 30s... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/health/alzheimers-prediction-speech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/health/alzheimers-predict...

apple4ever 5y ago
Oh wow that is helpful for me. My grandfather had Alzheimers, and my mother (his daughter) had frontotemperal dementia. So I know I'm at risk. This was a good article towards maybe helping out some research even if it doesn't help me specifically.

apple4ever 5y ago

This would be great. My mother had Fronto-temporal dementia, and her father (my grandfather) had Alzheimers. So after she passed for it, the fact I might get it has been heavily weighing on my mind. I've looked for various things to "test" myself, and notice things about me that might be nothing but also might be something. To be able to get a risk factor would at least either let me worry less, or have an answer that it is in a percent of likelihood.