Many myths and misunderstandings circulate about dementia. And to get a grasp of what dementia actually is, it’s important to have a clear idea about what it certainly isn’t. So here’s a selection of some of the most common misconceptions, to help sort fact from fiction.
✔ All old people get dementia. Although the chances of developing dementia do increase as we get older, it’s not a normal part of the ageing process. In fact only 1 in 14 people over the age of 65 and 1 in 6 over 80 suffer from it.
✔ Dementia is the same as Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease is just one of a number of brain diseases that lead to dementia.
✔ Memory loss equals dementia. Dementia does affect memory, but for someone to be diagnosed with the condition he needs to show many other more complex symptoms rather than simply poor memory alone.
✔ Everyone with dementia becomes aggressive. While some people with dementia can become agitated, aggression isn’t a universal feature of dementia and is usually triggered by the way someone is treated or communicated with rather than being a symptom of the dementia alone.
✔ A diagnosis of dementia means a person’s life is over. Despite the fact that the condition is chronic and progressive, many medical, social and psychological treatments and strategies are available to help make life as fulfilling as possible for someone with dementia, for many years.
✔ Everyone with dementia ends up in a nursing home. While one third of people with dementia do eventually need this level of intense care in the latter stages of their condition, many people are able to access enough help and support to spend the rest of their lives in their own homes.
✔ My nan has dementia, so I’m going to get it too. Some forms of dementia do have a genetic component and so may run in families, but these are in the minority. For most people, it doesn’t follow that because a relative has dementia, they’ll get it too. And contrary to what one patient of mine thought, you can’t catch it off your nan either!
Now that I’ve excluded all the people who don’t really have dementia from the discussion, I can look more accurately at what the statistics reveal about who actually has the diagnosis. And, unfortunately, the results still make rather sobering reading.
The statistics tell us that every four seconds, someone in the world is diagnosed with dementia. That’s 15 people per minute, 900 per hour and 1,350 during a 90-minute game of football or an average-length Hollywood blockbuster. In fact, by the time you go to bed tonight, around another 21,600 people will have been told they have dementia in the previous 24 hours. Over the course of 12 months, that’s a whopping 7.7 million new cases.
And, worse still, those people are just the tip of the diagnostic iceberg, because it’s reckoned that up to six out of ten people with dementia may still be undiagnosed in the UK alone. Start adding those figures into the calculations, and the statistics start to look even more frightening.
Without being sensationalist, knowing what we’re all up against is important, not only so that governments and health professionals can plan for the types of care that may be needed as the disease becomes more common, but also to enable individuals and their families to be reassured that they’re by no means alone in their struggles.
According to statistics from the organisation Alzheimer’s Disease International:
✔ Currently, 44.4 million people around the world are living with dementia.
✔ The number of people living with dementia is expected to double by 2030 and treble by 2050.
✔ Sixty-two per cent of people with dementia live in developing countries, a proportion that’s expected to rise to 71 per cent by 2050.
✔ In economic terms, the cost of dementia care is $600 billion worldwide, which means that
• If dementia was a country, it would be the world’s 18th-largest economy, sandwiched between Turkey and Indonesia.
• If dementia was a multinational company, it would be the biggest in the world, out-grossing both Walmart and Exxon Mobile.
✔ The increase in diagnoses will hit different parts of the world more significantly than others; thus an estimated 90 per cent increase will occur in Europe, 226 per cent in Asia, 345 per cent in Africa and 248 per cent across North and South America.
✔ More worrying still, out of the 193 member countries of the World Health Organization, only 13 have a national dementia plan – and none of these are in Africa.
The statistics for the UK, provided by Alzheimer’s Research UK and the Alzheimer’s Society, show the extent to which people in this country contribute to the worldwide dementia figures:
✔ Currently, 820,000 people in the UK have dementia, meaning that 25 million people know a friend or relative with the condition.
✔ The number of people in the UK with dementia will at least double by 2050.
✔ Two-thirds of the people with dementia in the UK are women.
✔ Dementia costs the economy £23 billion per year, which is more than cancer and heart disease combined; this funding equates to an average of more than £27,000 per person with dementia each year.
✔ Despite the increased cost of treating dementia, investment in dementia research is almost 12 times lower than for cancer (£50 million versus £590 million per year).
A clear correlation exists between increasing age and the chances of developing dementia. In fact, fewer than 2 per cent of people are diagnosed under the age of 65. The Alzheimer’s Society suggests that the figures can be broken down as follows:
The obvious question is whether dementia will become more common as we live longer. Thanks to advances in science, medicine and technology, as a species we’re living increasingly longer. Life expectancy until 30,000 years ago is believed to have been less than 30 years, and right up until the 1800s it was common for adults to die by the age of 40. Now the average man in the UK can expect to live for 78.9 years, while a woman can make it to the ripe old age of 82.7.
Over the next few decades these figures are expected to rise along with the proportion of older people in the population as a whole. According to government figures, currently 10 million people in the UK are over 65 years of age. By 2035, it’s estimated that another 5.5 million more elderly people will be resident in the UK, rising to around 19 million by 2050.
A boy born in the UK in 2030 will have a good chance of living until he’s 91, and a girl to 95. Given the rising chance of developing dementia with age, it’s feared that cases will become far more common as a result of this boom in life expectancy.
One of the commonest misconceptions about dementia is that it equals Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease certainly does equal dementia, but numerous other causes of dementia also exist.
Also consider mild cognitive impairment, which is not yet dementia but not part of the