Experts are weighing in on President Donald Trump's mental and physical health after his first year in office.
Speaking with iPaper, Dr. John Gartner, American psychologist, psychiatrist and former assistant professor at John Hopkins Medical School, explained, "the main way to diagnose dementia is that we see a deterioration from someone’s own baseline in these four areas: language, memory, behaviour, and psychomotor performance."
His swollen ankles and feet, along with his bruised hands, have sparked conversation about the oldest president ever inaugurated. While the White House claims Trump takes too much aspirin and suffers from chronic venous insufficiency, there continue to be questions about his mental decline as well.
Since taking office, Trump has bragged that he's taken multiple cognitive tests. Such testing appeared to have begun in 2018, according to a New York Times report at the time. In January, Trump revealed that he had taken three cognitive tests in December.
Dr. Vin Gupta said that there appears to be a “symmetry” between the president’s recent behavior and early warning signs of the disease, as quoted by the Huffington Post last month.
Trump's constant claims that former President Joe Biden was in cognitive and physical decline only highlight questions about himself and his own health problems.
Trump recently acknowledged undergoing a CT scan, after initially misstating it as an MRI, with doctors saying it was to rule out cardiovascular problems and showed no abnormalities.
Fred Trump Sr. suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, so some are raising questions about whether the family history could be impacting the president.
"Trump hit back last month in an interview, claiming that while his father had Alzheimer’s, he did not. However, in doing so, he forgot the name of the disease," the site stated.
“First of all, if you look at tapes of him in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. He was still a jerk… but he was speaking in polished paragraphs," continued Gartner. “Now he has trouble completing a sentence, a thought and sometimes even a word… That’s a huge deterioration from his baseline, and he also used to be quite physically coordinated, and now he can barely walk a straight line."
Indeed, a video of Trump arriving in Switzerland showed him weaving as he walked from the plane.
“On the red carpet at Davos you may have noticed him weaving. That relates to one of the signs of what I think he has: frontotemporal dementia. That walk is called a wide base gait where he swings his right leg in kind of a semicircle and that drives him to the left,” Gartner continued. “That seems to have gotten dramatically worse recently. It may be related to the stroke I think he’s had on the left side of his body.”
A stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) isn't the same as a prolonged degenerative brain disease, though it can cause motor function changes.
It can "produce tremendous disinhibition of behavior because it’s the frontal lobes that are the brakes of the brain. So that’s what inhibits us from acting out,” he said.
“Part of his brain [appears to be] deteriorating disproportionately, so he’s losing the brakes, and this is someone who was always impulsive and always acted out aggressively… Whilst he’s becoming confused about what’s happening, he’s also becoming aggressively disinhibited to act in impulsive and erratic ways," the doctor said.
It is something that is noticeable since the last administration, he observed, but "now we're seeing deterioration almost week over week. The rate of decline is accelerating.”
The doctor confirmed, “The high-pressure job can also accelerate cognitive dysfunction.”
The report added that many experts caution that no one can diagnose the president without a proper examination.