Epidemiology, Dementia, and Alzheimer’s Disease: Methods Influence Conclusions

The brief descriptive epidemiology of dementia is included within, at most several paragraphs in many neurology and geriatric medicine texts. To paraphrase what texts often seem to say we offer the following; the first sub-paragraph is often all that is included under epidemiology:… Dementia has many causes, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD) predominate. The occurrence of dementia is more common with increasing age; both the incidence (new cases per time) and the prevalence (proportion of persons living with dementia) increase almost exponentially with age after about age 60. There are more women living with dementia than there are men, yet for a given age group the occurrence of new cases per unit time may be similar in both genders. Estimates indicate 5% to 10% of persons over age 64 are living with dementia and 1% to 3% of those over age 64 acquire the syndrome annually in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia.