“As the baby boom generation reaches its hopefully golden years, scientists have been projecting a doubling of dementia cases in the U.S. by 2050, alarming health care agencies, the public, and health economists. Now, a new editorial argues this ‘tsunami’ could be more of a gentle wave. In the March 12 JAMA, Eric Stallard, Svetlana Ukraintseva, and Murali Doraiswamy at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, explain that tsunami predictions assume that dementia prevalence in each age range remains constant over time. That is not the case, they say.

Their analysis of three large population studies found that age-adjusted prevalence has dropped by a whopping two-thirds over the last 40 years. In other words, every successive birth cohort has a lower risk of dementia than did its predecessor. Extrapolated forward, these rates would predict only a 25 percent bump in dementia cases by 2050.”

From Alzforum.