Navigating dementia

GETTING lost and losing your ability to navigate could be a red alert for dementia.

And scientists say changes in how we map our surroundings may provide an earlier sign of Alzheimer’s disease than memory loss.

Older people are worse at learning routes because of brain aging changes. Healthy people can plot a route to a destination based on their current location.

But people at risk of dementia base the journey on landmarks, and often struggle to get from one landmark to the next as they cannot learn the route in between.