I recently had the privilege of attending the Global Agenda Council on Ageing Symposium, the central aim of which is to provide a forum for discussion and knowledge exchange surrounding the theme of ‘Managing ageing and cognitive decline: challenges and opportunities for financial services’.

I was particularly struck by two keynote talks.

The first was from Professor Ian Deary, Director of MRC Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemology at the University of Edinburgh. He was primarily talking about his involvement with the “Lothian Birth Cohorts”. This refers to two groups of people – those born in 1921 and those born in 1936 – who all took a test of mental ability at school when they were 11 years old. The test was set by the Scottish Council for Research in Education to help develop education policy. Those who organised the test could not have anticipated that it would have important repercussions several decades later in a completely different field, as researchers became interested in cognitive ageing.

Professor Deary and his team at the University of Edinburgh traced and contacted the people who took the original tests and enrolled them into the two Lothian Birth Cohorts. Members of the cohorts have participated in a wide variety of investigations including cognitive tests, lifestyle questionnaires, medical examinations, blood tests and brain scans, with the results being analysed to determine the social, psychological, medical and genetic factors that determine cognitive changes.

Whilst a bit of a simplification of preliminary results of what is a complex study, it would seem that from a causal perspective, approx 50% of good cognition in later life is linked to good cognition at age 11. Some 25% is linked to differences in people’s genetics and the remaining 25% to physical fitness and a lesser allostatic load ( “the wear and tear on the body” which grows over time when the individual is exposed to repeated or chronic stress). This latter percentage also includes not smoking, being more physically active and fit, speaking more than one language, having more education and having a more professional education. Professor Deary and his team are still looking for more. Thankfully (for me anyway) there is little evidence to support the idea that playing Sudoku has much of an impact!

Read more about Professor Ian Deary

The second talk that particularly caught my interest was from Dr Daniel Marson, Professor of Neurology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA who spoke fluently on how dementia and ageing impacts our ability to manage money. Whilst recognising that we need to distinguish between normal cognitive ageing, for example the loss of arithmetic knowledge with age, and disease based cognitive decline he went on to highlight evidence that supports the view that “due to their cognitive complexity, financial skills are the functional skills first effected by and most vulnerable to cognitive ageing and dementia”. He also went on to raise the related issue of ‘ the greying of the financial advice profession’ in the USA (where 43% of financial advisers are over aged 55) and the impact of cognitive ageing on this group, which is of increasing concern to regulators and other stakeholders that side of the pond. He went on to draw delegates’ attention to a book called ‘The Future of Professions’ by Susskind & Susskind which predicts the decline of today’s professions and describes the systems that will replace them. Whilst I still believe ‘Robo-advice’ will require human intervention at some point and that Barlcays’ current technology mantra “harness technology with humanity to create simplicity” is a worthwhile objective, I’m beginning to think that as a member of the baby boomer generation I really have been lucky in many ways and perhaps it’s time to retire and head for the South of France, sit on the beach and pull out my tattered copy of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’!