Brain changes that signal Alzheimer's disease even before symptoms appear are linked to an increased vulnerability to financial scams, new research shows.

“Assessing financial vulnerability in older adults could help identify those who are in the early stages of mild cognitive impairment or dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease,” said study lead author Duke Han. He's a professor of psychology and family medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Unscrupulous con artists can reach out to seniors via phone or email with various scams that, in some instances, can wipe out retirement savings.

In many cases, early-onset dementia has rendered these seniors more vulnerable, Han's group said.

The USC team conducted two types of tests in a group of 97 people over the age of 50. None had obvious signs of cognitive troubles when they joined the study.

In one test, all participants underwent high powered MRIs to look at the thickness of a brain area called the entorhinal cortex. This region helps foster communication between the hippocampus (a center for learning and memory) and the the medial prefrontal cortex, which regulates emotion, motivation and other cognitive functions.

Prior research has shown that pre-symptomatic Alzheimer's disease often manifests as a "thinning out" of the entorhinal cortex, which progresses as the disease becomes more apparent.

All of the 97 participants also took a test gauging their score on the Perceived Financial Exploitation Vulnerability Scale (PFVS), a standard way of assessing a person's likelihood of getting involved in scams or other financial trouble.

The result: Folks who scored low on the PFVS tended to have a thinner entorhinal cortex than those who did well. That finding was especially true for folks aged 70 and older, Han's group noted.

He stressed that the study was designed to only look for associations — it couldn't prove that entorhinal cortex changes led to vulnerability to scams.

However, given that a thinning of the entorhinal cortex often occurs before Alzheimer's becomes symptomatic, the financial scam vulnerability test might be a new means of catching the disease early.

Assessing a person's financial risk "could become part of a broader risk profile" for Alzheimer's, Han said in a university news release.

The findings were published Sept. 3 in the journal Cerebral Cortex.