Another day, another alarming brain-related story hits the news:
Dementia is striking victims earlier and death rates are soaring
Modern living has led to earlier dementia, says study
In fact the study in question doesn’t show that. The paper, published in Surgical Neurological International is from British researchers Colin Pritchard and Emily Rosenorn-Lanng.
The authors show that the number of deaths attributed to neurological diseases (including dementia) have risen in recent years. Using World Health Organization (WHO) data from twenty-one industrialized countries, Pritchard and Rosenorn-Lanng found that the rate of neurological deaths in the over 75s more than doubled (112 percent increase) in twenty years, 1990 to 2010.
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That’s the finding. At first sight, this does seem a “Cause for Concern”, as the authors put it in the paper’s title. Neurological diseases are killing twice as many people! But that’s just one interpretation of these results.
Another interpretation is that people are just getting older. From 1990 to 2010, life expectancy increased and there are more old people now. Everyone knows that dementia is more common in old people. So an ageing population will, all else being equal, inevitably suffer more dementia.
Another problem is diagnosis. Awareness of dementia is rising, and doctors today might be more willing to diagnose the condition than they were in 1990. This could plausibly explain some, or all, of the rise in recorded neurological deaths. Pritchard and Rosenorn-Lanng acknowledge the problem of diagnostic “fashions”, but they brush it aside, saying that “the WHO international data is the most reliable available”.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: No Evidence for an Early Dementia Epidemic
