Alzheimer’s Reaching Epidemic Proportions?

There are over 5 million US citizens living today with Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias. This represents a 10% increase in the last 5 years, according to an Alzheimer’s Association sponsored study. Extrapolating from today, the report states that : “ By mid-century, the number of people with Alzheimer’s is expected to grow to as many as 16 million, more than the current total population of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston combined.”

Apart from the financial consequences, who will take care of all these patients? An interesting report in the British Medical Journal suggests that new thinking about the way we count our population groups may help define the next group of major caregivers. Instead of the usual grouping – young people, those of working age, and elderly people - there needs to be a new classification: young people, those of working age, young retired people (aged 50 - 75), and the oldest people (aged 85 and over. At present, using the three-group classification of the population, the support and care base for the ‘elderly people’ is calculated as the number of people aged 20 - 64 who are available to look after both the 0 - 19 year olds and the over 65 year olds. It’s about 0.7, i.e. there are 0.7 adults available to care for children and the elderly. This number will only increase to about 0.9 by 2040.

Using the new 4-group population classification, and assuming the young-retired (50 - 75) are the caregivers for the oldest (over 85), the number available to care for one oldest person is about 9, and this will only fall to around 5 by 2040. The clear implication is that the newly retired must face up to the job of helping care for the oldest, and increasing this effort in the next 20 to 30 years.

(The publication doesn’t discuss the ‘missing’ 75 - 84-year-olds. I guess this means I’m off the hook until I join the recipients of care in a few years’ time.)

The rapidly increasing numbers of dementia patients will make it even more important that the ‘young-retired’ take their share in caring for their older relatives and friends in the future; one can only hope that research efforts to find a cure for Alzheimer’s will succeed, to make future years more tolerable for everyone.