Has the kind changed, or only the amount?
Losing a name and recovering it twenty minutes later is the same event at thirty as at seventy. Losing the names of people in your own household, repeatedly, is a different event altogether.
Run the same test across the other categories. Misplacing keys and finding them by retracing your steps is ordinary; keys turning up somewhere nobody can account for is not. Telling the same story twice in a month is ordinary; asking the same question twice before lunch is not. Forgetting part of a conversation is ordinary; no recollection that the conversation happened is not.
Who noticed?
This one carries more weight than people expect. Somebody who comes to an appointment worried about their own memory, unaccompanied, is on average in better shape than somebody brought in by a family member who has been noticing things.
Worrying about it is itself a reasonably good sign. It requires the insight to compare your current self against your previous self, which is one of the things that tends to go.
Is daily life still working?
The practical threshold most clinicians use is function. Not whether you forget things, but whether forgetting has begun to interfere with driving, with managing money, with taking medication correctly, or with running a household.
A person who loses words constantly but whose life runs normally is in a different category from a person who forgets less often but has started missing bill payments.
What else changed around the same time?
Memory complaints that began within a few months of a new prescription, a bereavement, a period of poor sleep or a change in alcohol intake deserve that context brought to the appointment. The list of reversible causes is longer than most people assume — thyroid, B12, medication side effects, apnoea, depression, untreated hearing loss — and several of them are found with a blood test and a look at a prescription list.
Are you avoiding the appointment?
The commonest reason people delay is fear of what will be found. It is worth saying plainly that the majority of people who book this appointment do not receive a dementia diagnosis, and that a meaningful share leave with something treatable identified.
And where the news is harder, earlier still matters: for planning, for access to support, and for the treatments that exist. Waiting has never improved any version of this.