Commentary: A Role for Neuroscience in Preventing Financial Elder Abuse

Abstract

Financial elder abuse is an epidemic that has reached staggering proportions in the United States. It is a complex and multidimensional social problem whose solution will require sustained and multipronged efforts by state and federal policy makers, prosecutors and the legal system, adult protective service agencies, and also the scientific community. This commentary briefly describes the challenge of diminished financial capacity and associated financial elder abuse for our society, and the role that neuroscience can and is playing in helping to address it. In particular, this article focuses on recent contributions of neuroimaging research to understanding loss of financial capacity in older adults and vulnerability to financial elder abuse. Although financial capacity is essential for all community-dwelling adults, it is a topic with particularly important implications and urgency for older adults: there is a tremendous and underappreciated “financial capacity problem” posed by our rapidly growing older adult population. Older adults represent that portion of the U.S. population most vulnerable to impairment and loss of financial skills and capacity, as a result of the cognitive decline associated with normal cognitive aging, and with dementias of aging such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease ( Marson & Sabatino, 2012 ).

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