Risk and future burden of dementia in the United States – National Institutes of Health (NIH) | (.gov)

Risk and future burden of dementia in the United States  National Institutes of Health (NIH) | (.gov)

Researchers estimated that 42% of Americans over age 55 will eventually develop dementia. Dementia affects more than 6 million Americans and accounts for more than 100,000 deaths each year. Knowing people’s lifetime risk of dementia can lead to improved prevention efforts. It can also inform public health planning by generating projections of future cases. Previous estimates of lifetime dementia risk in the United States are 11-14% for men and 19-23% for women. But these are based on older data in which dementia wasn’t reliably documented and early-stage cases were often missed. These data were also typically limited to non-Hispanic White populations. A research team led by Drs. Josef Coresh at New York University Grossman School of Medicine and Michael Fang at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health generated updated estimates of lifetime dementia risk across different subsets of the population.

They also projected the number of people who would be newly diagnosed with dementia in the U.S. between 2020 and 2060. Results appeared in Nature Medicine on January 13, 2025. The team analyzed data on more than 15,000 people from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study. All the people studied were free of dementia at age 55. More than a quarter were Black, and more than half were women. About 31% had at least one copy of the