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Alzheimer's Cases to Triple by 2050


New estimates suggest that there were 4.7 million individuals aged 65 years or older with Alzheimer's disease dementia in the US in 2010 and that this number will triple to 13.8 million by 2050.
These latest estimates, published online February 6 inNeurology, were devised by a team from the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging, Chicago, Illinois.
"These are staggering numbers," coauthor Jennifer Weuve, MPH, ScD, commented to Medscape Medical News. "The ramifications for society and family caregivers in particular are huge."
"This is not really a surprise," she added. "It's a bit like climate change. We've known about it for years but we haven't done much to stop it. Our data drum home the message that research into the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's must be a priority, as well as developing better ways of managing patients with the condition and helping caregivers."
A Complicated Task
Weuve explained that trying to estimate the number Alzheimer's cases in the country is a complicated task because medical and public health agencies are not good at documenting these statistics. In addition, Alzheimer's is hugely underdiagnosed.
She elaborated: "A diagnosis of Alzheimer's requires that you show up in a clinic and a physician actually thinks about dementia. Many patients go to their primary care doctor for something else, and although they may come across as confused, the doctor just puts this down to age and never formally diagnoses Alzheimer's, so about half of Alzheimer's cases go undiagnosed. Because of this, we had to be resourceful when trying to work out how many cases there actually were."
To get around this problem, Weuve and her colleagues based their estimates on a sample of 10,000 older adults, aged 65 years and older, who actually underwent neurologic testing as part of the Chicago Health and Aging Project, a longitudinal, population-based study.
They then worked out the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease according to age, sex, educational level, and race. By using US census data, this information was translated to the national population of the United States.
Of the 4.7 million individuals with Alzheimer's in 2010, the researchers estimated that 0.7 million were 65 to 74 years, 2.3 million were 75 to 84 years, and 1.8 million were 85 years or older.
With further use of census data, they then calculated how the older adult population will change over the next 40 years, and applied the 2010 prevalence data to future populations.
This gave an estimate of 13.8 million people with Alzheimer's in 2050, of whom 7 million would be aged 85 years or older.
This work was funded by the Alzheimer's Association and a grant from National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging. The authors have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

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