When the 46th President of the United States took the debate stage a week ago, it was clear from his first answer that this would not be the performance he had hoped for.
As a brain specialist, it was unsettling to see President Joe Biden, and it quickly became clear that I was not alone in my reaction. Over the past week, I’ve received more than a dozen calls, texts, and emails from medical colleagues who, like me, specialize in the brain. It’s not that what we were seeing was new, but that it was particularly pronounced, and had been since the debate began.
From a neurological standpoint, we were concerned about his disorganized babbling; sudden loss of concentration in the middle of a sentence; halting speech and absence of facial animation, sometimes resulting in a flat, open mouth. To be clear, these are just observations, in no way diagnostic of anything deeper, and none of these doctors wanted to suggest that this was the case.
However, the doctors who contacted me agreed that the president should be encouraged to undergo testing for cognitive and movement disorders and that the results should be made public.
Over the past five years, I’ve reported extensively on advances in the world of treating and reducing the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, Lewy body dementia, and vascular dementia. For the documentary “The Last Alzheimer’s Patient,” I even underwent extensive cognitive testing to show what it entailed and to determine if I had any problems with executive function, judgment, or memory loss, as well as blood tests to determine things like the level of abnormal proteins that might be present in my brain and my B12 levels. My sense of smell and my genetic risk factors were checked. That type of testing isn’t routinely needed for most people, but all of the brain doctors I spoke to recommended that level of testing for Biden.
Read the full analysis by Dr. Sanjay Gupta