Dementia syndrome and Alzheimer disease: an assessment of morbidity and annual incidence in Germany

Abstract

Due to the increasing life expectancy and the growing number of elderly people, dementia is emerging as a major health problem. There is, however, a lack of consistent data on the number of prevalent and incident cases of dementia in Germany. The aim of the present study was to estimate the prevalence 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 standardized according to the age structure of the German population. The results show that probably more than 900,000 persons in Germany suffer from a dementing illness, 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 Alzheimer's disease. Due to the higher life expectancy of women as compared to men 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 60% of the incident cases are found among people in the age bracket of 80 and over, whereas only 3% are found among persons younger than 65 years of age. Additionally, an estimate of the distribution of cases by the 16 Federal states of Germany is given.