Celebrity recognition tests dementia

The level of a person’s ability to recognise and name very famous faces is a good guide to signs of early-onset dementia.

A study suggests people aged 40-65 who can recognise and name very famous people such as Princess Diana, Oprah Winfrey, John F Kennedy, and Elvis Presley are unlikely to have the type of dementia covered by the study.

“People with this type of dementia consistently forget names of famous people they once knew — it’s more than forgetting a name or two of a famous person,” said senior author Emily Rogalski, an assistant research professor at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.