Prognosis with dementia in Europe: A collaborative study of population-based cohorts

The effect of dementia on time to death and institutionalization in elderly populations is of importance to resource planning, as well as to patients and their carers, The authors report a collaborative reanalysis of nine pop ulation-based studies conducted in Europe to compare dementia cases and non cases in risk of and time to death and to institutionalization. Prevalent a nd incident cases were more likely than noncases to reside in an institutio n at baseline and were more likely to enter institutional care. Prevalent c ases also had over twice the risk of death compared to noncases and surviva l for men with dementia was consistently lower than that for women with dem entia of the same age group.