Declines In Dementia: Of Hearts And Minds

In this season when we are meant to be thankful, but when so many of us have had so many reasons to be otherwise, we have received a timely, welcome bit of universally good news. Rates of dementia in the United States appear to be declining. This news reaches us courtesy of a study published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine. The investigators used standard, validated measures of cognitive function and dementia in two groups of more than 10,000 people in the U.S. with an average age of roughly 75 in the year 2000, and again in 2012. The overall rate of dementia declined over that span from 11.6% to 8.8%. Taking this news at face value, it is extremely encouraging. There have been rather dire projections that with the population in the U.S. and other developed countries aging, rates of dementia would rise in tandem. Alzheimer’s and related conditions are devastating, obviously, so the human cost of such a rise- imposed on victims of the condition and their caregivers alike- is the principal concern. But these projections also pertain to the financial devastation wrought by a tidal wave of dementia-related healthcare costs crashing into a system already drowning in the costs of chronic disease. Expecting dementia rates to rise and seeing them fall is simply good news. But inevitably, the whole story is not quite so simple.  For one thing, projections about a rise in dementia rates do relate directly to aging of the population, while thi...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news