Dementia on the rise

Filed in archive News on December 16, 2005

Dementia will be on the rise, especially in developing countries:

Experts are now predicting that the global incidence of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia will soar in the next few decades, especially in developing countries.

That prediction is made by an international group of 12 experts, two of them American, who were provided with "a systematic review of published studies on dementia" by Alzheimer's Disease International, a London-based organization.

"We estimate that 24.3 million people have dementia today, with 4.6 million new cases of dementia every year," the experts report in the Dec. 17 issue of The Lancet. "The number of people [with dementia] will Double every 20 years, to 81.1 million by 2040," they added.

The number of cases will double by 2040 in developed countries such as the United States, but will more than triple in India, China and other countries in south Asia and the western Pacific, the experts wrote.