This story has been updated.
In 1996, the year Donald Trump took over the skyscraper at 40 Wall Street and blazed a new trail in the casino business, a young Lebanese Canadian doctor named Ziad Nasreddine created a pioneering way to screen people for early signs of dementia.
Nasreddine’s evaluation was called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or the MoCA test. Using simple prompts, it was designed to help doctors detect mild cognitive impairment that could signal the onset of Alzheimer’s disease or other problems. It has proved so effective over the past two decades that it has been translated into dozens of languages and is used by physicians in more than 100 countries.
