Dorien Bangma

FDM CAPABILITY OF PATIENTS WITH MCI, AD AND PD | 117 Financial decisions and neurodegenerative disorders: what do we know at present? A recent systematic review and meta-analysis (Bangma, Tucha, Tucha, et al., 2020) shows that to date 47 studies have been published that focused on financial decision-making by patients with neurodegenerative disorders using objective performance tests. All those studies used tests that claimed to measure financial knowledge, financial judgment and/or financial performance. The vast majority of the 47 studies focused on AD (k = 25) and MCI (k = 26). They all consistently showed that patients with AD scored lower on tests of financial knowledge, financial judgment and/or financial performance than healthy controls. The studies that focused on MCI too showed that these patients scored significantly lower on the financial tests than healthy controls. Patients with MCI displayed intact performance, however, on a few financial tests, compared with healthy controls, but the tests on which they did so varied widely between the studies. When patients with AD and MCI were compared directly with one another (k = 13), it was found that patients in both the mild and moderate-to-severe stages of AD scored lower on tests of financial knowledge, financial judgment and/or financial performance than patients with MCI. Seven studies focusing on financial decision-making by patients with PD have been published to date (Bangma, Tucha, Tucha, et al., 2020). These showed that patients with PD too scored lower on financial tests than healthy controls. The degree of impaired financial decision-making by patients with PD would seem to depend on the severity of cognitive dysfunctions. When patients with PD are divided into groups with and without cognitive dysfunctions, the performance of those with no cognitive dysfunctions was similar to that of healthy controls. Patients with PD and MCI did display reduced performance on financial tests, compared with healthy controls and patients with PD with no cognitive impairments (Giannouli et al., 2018; Martin et al., 2013; Pirogovsky et al., 2014). Although the studies that have been conducted so far are transparent and have been provided a good deal of relevant information, they did have some shortcomings. First, they focused mainly on financial competence (i.e., financial knowledge and financial judgment); there has been far less research into financial performance, and not a single study has focused on both financial competence and financial performance. There has also been hardly any research into the contextual factors inherent in financial competence, financial performance in everyday life or associated with it. Lastly, all the studies conducted to date have focused on groups of patients, assessing whether one group performed better than the other group. The question, of course, is what a study of this kind can say about individual patients. Therefore, in current study, we describe the individual performance scores of nine patients on the FDM test battery, which focuses not only on financial knowledge, financial judgment and financial performance but also on various contextual factors. Results and Discussion Performance scores of patients with neurodegenerative disorders on the FDM test battery The nine patients described here all took part in ‘Financial decision-making in patients with neurodegenerative disorders – a pilot study’, which was approved by the medical ethics