Are You Checking Your Brain Health?

We monitor our heart, our blood pressure, and our cholesterol. Isn’t it time we monitored our brain, too? Checking your brain health regularly could be one of the best investments in your future.

As we age, we schedule checkups for nearly every organ in the body — but the brain is almost never on that list. Small shifts in memory, focus, or processing speed can be easy to dismiss as “just getting older,” yet they can also be the earliest signal of Alzheimer’s disease, another dementia, or the lingering cognitive fog that follows chemotherapy (“chemo brain”). Without a baseline, there is no way to tell the difference. For these reasons, regularly checking on your brain health is essential and should become part of your health routine.

The Value of Monitoring Your Brain Over Time

• Establish a personal baseline now, while your brain is healthiest, so any future change is measured against your own normal — not just an average from a standardized population. Remember that checking your brain health provides valuable insight for early intervention. Getting a baseline is important even if you are already observing signs of decline or slowing.
• Track memory, processing speed, reaction time, and executive function over time, often catching changes before they show up in daily life. When you are intentional about checking the health of your brain, you are better equipped to care for your cognition.
• Help distinguish ordinary aging from the early warning signs of Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias.
• Monitor chemo brain and other treatment-related cognitive effects so your care team can respond sooner. Also, it’s smart to make checking your brain health a regular part of your follow-up care.
• Give your physician objective, computerized test data — not just impressions — to guide your care.
• Your brain, like you, is one of a kind. It is the best way to be able to see where decline is taking place.
• Revisit your results year after year, the same way you follow your blood pressure or cholesterol.

Your brain deserves the same attention as the rest of your body. That’s why checking your brain health consistently can make all the difference in your overall well-being.

Using CNS Vital Signs® computerized neurocognitive testing, our one-session assessment maps memory, attention, and reasoning to give you a clear picture of how your brain is functioning today — and a foundation for tracking it for years to come. It truly is aging at your best. In short, with checking your brain health at the forefront, you empower yourself to be proactive in your wellness journey.

CNS Vital Signs® is a registered trademark of CNS Vital Signs, LLC.