Cognitive Test Trump Says He 'Aced' Is Supposed To Be Easy, Doctor Says

President Donald Trump may be very pleased he recently managed to “ace” a cognitive test, but it may have been more than dumb luck.

That’s because the doctor who designed a test recently given to Trump at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center said it’s actually supposed to be easy for people without cognitive impairment.

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test invented by Dr. Ziad Nasreddine in 1996 is a 10-minute examination that measures the strengths of different areas of the brain that handle short-term memory, spatial awareness and executive functioning.

But it doesn’t measure intelligence, Nasreddine stressed to MarketWatch.

“This is not an IQ test or the level of how a person is extremely skilled or not,” Nasreddine explained. “The test is supposed to help physicians detect early signs of Alzheimer’s, and it became very popular because it was a short test and very sensitive for early impairment.”

A normal score is about 27 out of 30, but Trump recently bragged about how he did on the test to both Sean Hannity and “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace.

To be fair, Wallace wasn’t impressed.

“It’s not the hardest test,” Wallace said. “They have a picture and it says, ‘What’s that?’ And it’s an elephant.”

But Nasreddine says critics who talk about how easy the test is are missing the point.

“It is supposed to be easy for someone who has no cognitive impairment,” he said.

One of the more difficult tasks requires a person to be given five words to remember and then they are asked to recall them 10 minutes later.

“That’s the most difficult part of the test for someone who has cognitive impairment,” Nasreddine told MarketWatch.

Although Trump has been ridiculed for bragging about how he did on the cognitive test, Nasreddine believes that cognitive impairment is a relevant issue this election year considering Trump is 74 and his challenger, Joe Biden, is 77.

“Dementia becomes more prevalent with age,” Nasreddine said. “Statistically, one person out of four could have cognitive impairment or dementia at age 75. So it is a pertinent question, and it’s not surprising that this is becoming an issue this election.”

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Poor Diet

It's no secret that our diet plays a significant role in our health -- but can it also affect our memory and cognition? A 2009 study at the University of Cambridge found that rats who consumed a high-fat diet took 25 percent longer time to complete a maze than when they consumed a normal diet, suggesting that a high-fat diet can impair cognitive function, at least. Researchers from the University of South Carolina at Charleston arrived at similar results when they found that rats fed a diet high in saturated fat and cholesterol performed poorer and made more mistakes on a similar maze test compared with rats on a low-cholesterol, unsaturated-fat diet. The "low-carb" diet was examined by Tufts University researchers in 2008. The women involved with the study chose either a low-carb diet or a diet meeting the recommended guidelines from the American Dietetic Association. Participants on the low-carb diet performed worse on memory-based tasks than those on the ADA diet.

Smoking

Numerous studies have linked smoking with memory decline, including one published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2003. This study associated cigarette smoking with faster declines in verbal memory between 43 and 53 years of age. In 2010, researchers from the University of California at San Francisco analyzed studies of the the connection between smoking and Alzheimer's disease. They found that smoking cigarettes was a high risk factor for the disease and nearly doubled a person's chance of developing Alzheimer's. Though smoking is certainly bad for your health, some research has suggested that the nicotine from smoking cigarettes could enhance cognition and memory -- and perhaps play a role in why people become dependent on tobacco products. A 2008 study published in Psychopharmacology looked at a series of literature on the subject, dating from 1994 to 2008. The results suggested that nicotine positively affected several domains of cognition, including short-term episodic memory accuracy, working memory and response time.

Not Enough Sleep

As researcher Robert Stickgold pointed out in his 2005 study, the question of how sleep affects our learning and memory is anything but a new concept. But with Americans becoming more and more sleep-deprived -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that 28 percent of U.S. adults report frequent insufficient sleep -- researchers haven't stopped examining the effects. One 2007 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that participants who were sleep-deprived for 24 hours had reduced levels of visual short-term memory, but other research suggests that this connection might not apply to everyone. In a 2009 study published in the Journal of Sleep Research, participants aged 14 to 16 years received only four hours of sleep one night, preceded by a nine-hour night of sleep and followed by a nine-hour night of sleep. The adolescents' memory consolidation did not appear to be affected by the change in sleep pattern. However, numerous other studies, like this one from the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, suggest otherwise, saying adolescent participants' performance on working memory tasks were hindered by poor or insufficient sleep. Dr. Nelson says an important thing to keep in mind is that it's not the quantity of sleep but the quality of sleep that counts, because certain stages of sleep are more vital for memory consolidation. "You could have someone who gets an adequate number of hours of sleep, but if you interrupt them as they're going into certain cycles you can undercut their memory consolidation," Nelson says.

Lack Of Exercise

By now, we all know that exercise is good for us. It can also prevent memory loss as we age, says a study published earlier this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study sought to determine whether exercise can modify the volume of our hippocampus -- the part of our brain involved with forming memories -- during late adulthood. Researchers found that exercise could do just that, thereby improving memory function. The cool part about this, Dr. Nelson says, is that it seems to convey benefits even for people who are older. The research suggests that it's never too late to begin exercising and improving memory function.

Alcohol Consumption

That our memory is hindered by chronic alcohol use and abuse probably seems like a no-brainer. But what about after a "normal" night of social drinking with friends? A 2004 study published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism tested participants the mornings after an evening out over a course of several weeks. The researchers found delayed recognition, even though blood alcohol levels were at or near zero at the time of testing, suggesting that memory is impaired after a night of drinking. However, there is some research suggesting that moderate consumption of alcohol can actually benefit brain health, Dr. Nelson says, such as a 2002 study published in The Lancet that suggested that moderate alcohol consumption could reduce the risk of dementia. Dr. Nelson says that this creates a sort of double-edged sword, since consuming too much alcohol can obviously lead to abuse and serious health problems.

But Wait -- There's Hope!

Concerned that your daily habits are harming your memory? Check out some of these memory-boosting tips.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.