President Donald Trump's new brag that he aced another cognitive test alarmed a medical expert on MS NOW on Friday.
Earlier in the day, Trump claimed on his Truth Social platform that White House doctors reported him in "perfect health" after his third straight perfect score.
“The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED (Meaning, was correct on 100% of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.
The brag raised eyebrows for Dr. Vin Gupta, who told viewers of "Deadline: White House" later Friday that Trump was bragging about passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MOCA, which doctors use when they're worried a patient may be displaying signs of "age-related cognitive decline, so-called mild cognitive impairment or early stage dementia."
"This is something that we tend to go through these screening tools whenever we're worried about, say, age-related cognitive decline, so-called mild cognitive impairment, or early-stage dementia, where we worry about memory loss. Maybe people are forgetting linear thinking. They lose their train of thought," Gupta said. "So we do something called a MOCA test, Montreal Cognitive Assessment tool, to see is there issues with recall."
Evidence of this could be a patient rehashing the same four or five words. While doing such testing a couple times a year isn't overly alarming, the president talked about doing so weekly.
"This is not the flex that he thinks it is, to paraphrase Nicolle Wallace," said Gupta. "You don't do this every other day and somehow use that as evidence that you're cognitively there."
He added that patients who undergo Montreal tests with such frequency typically means their doctors are worried about early stage dementia or cognitive impairment.
"He might be ruling himself into something that he doesn't want to rule himself into," he concluded.
