The Scripts News Agency asked if I could assess a politician's cognitive fitness by listening to their speech and language. My answer disappointed them.

Speech and language analysis can help assess brain health. Unrehearsed communication functions like the warning lights in your car. If the oil light turns red, it may be a false indicator, but you'd be foolish to ignore it. The same is true for suspicions of dementia.

Dementia is not a specific disease. Think of it as "cancer." Nobody has "cancer." They have "prostate cancer," "brain cancer," "breast cancer," or any of the other 200 types of cancer that have been identified. When you hear or use the word "dementia," it refers to how the brain processes information. You may have wondered what the difference is between "dementia" and "Alzheimer's." Alzheimer's is one of more than 100 types of dementia, although the most frequent type of dementia is Alzheimer's.

Politicians don't share results of cognitive tests (Note: Neither remembering the names and sequence of six objects nor counting backwards from 100 are cognitive diagnostic tests!) But much can be learned by analyzing politicians' speech and language.

By doing a linguistic analysis of unrehearsed communication (spontaneous speech), the presence of dementia may be found. While not as definitive as........

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