Dementia and Alzheimer's disease: An estimate of prevalent and incident cases in Germany

Due to the increasing life expectancy and the growing number of elderly peo ple, dementia is emerging as a major health problem. There is, however, a l ack of consistent data on the number of prevalent and incident cases of dem entia in Germany. The aim of the present study was to estimate the prevalen ce and the incidence of dementing disorders in general as well as Alzheimer 's disease in particular on the basis of disease rates based on large-scale epidemiological field studies and meta-analyses, which were standardised a ccording to the age structure of the German population. The results show th at probably more than 900,000 persons in Germany suffer from a dementing il lness, 650,000 among them from Alzheimer's disease. About 200,000 new cases of dementia develop during one year, among them 120,000 new cases of Alzhe imer's disease. Due to the higher life expectancy of women as compared to m en 70% of the patients are of female gender. As a consequence of the steep increase of disease rates with age, two-thirds of the prevalent cases and 6 0% of the incident cases are found among people in the age bracket of 80 an d over, whereas only 3% are found among persons younger than 65 years of ag e. Additionally, an estimate of the distribution of cases by the 16 Federal states of Germany is given.