New cases of dementia in the United States fell from 2015 to 2021, but the number of people who lived with the condition continued to rise as a result of the aging of the population, by nearly 2.9 million traditional medicine charts (about 12%) who believe a dementia diagnosis in 2021, The BMJ Today.
Moreover, a greater burden of dementia was seen in marginalized and low resources communities, which emphasized the importance of policy presents to promote fair dementia care, the researchers say.
It is estimated that dementia will be more than double to meet nearly 14 million people in the US by 2060, with awarding social and economic implications. But the evidence of high quality about recent trends in new cases (incidence) and prevalence (existing cases) of dementia in the routine clinical practice is scarce.
To tackle this, researchers used medical claim data to determine the incidence and prevalence of dementia by race, sex and neighborhood process in more than 5 million compensation for Service Medicare Medicare beneficiaries aged 66 or older between 2015 and 2021.
After taking into account differences in age and gender, the total incidence of dementia fell between 2015 and 2021 from 3.5% to 2.8%, but the prevalence increased from 10.5% to 11.8% at this time.
Male beneficiaries had a higher incidence than female beneficiaries of the same age in 2015 (3.5% V 3.4%), a difference that was greater with 2021 (2.9% V 2.6%).
To add context to these figures, the authors notice that although men have a higher incidence than women of the same age, the majority of people with dementia are female (60% in 2021), so the impact on the population level of dementia is the most prominent among women (probably because more women live long enough to develop dementia).
Moreover, the burden of dementia was unevenly distributed, with the highest incidence and prevalence of dementia in black beneficiaries and those who live in social -economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
For example, the incidence was highest in 2015 for black beneficiaries (4.2%), followed by Spanish beneficiaries (3.7%) and white beneficiaries (3.4%), and in 2021 for black beneficiaries (3.1%) followed by white beneficiaries (2.8%) and Hispanic Gunecials.
Possible reasons behind the reduced incidence of dementia include better management of cardiovascular risk factors and COVID-19 deaths in patients who would otherwise have received the diagnosis of dementia, while the increase in the prevalence is probably due to more people who survive long enough to develop dementia, or more people live longer.
This is an observational study, so no fixed conclusions can be drawn on cause and effect, and the authors recognize different limitations, including that Medicare Claims are not fully accurate, limited in their classification of race and ethnicity and possibly not applicable to patients with different insurance coverage.
Nevertheless, they say that their results are based on a large national sample of routine data, so that they could accurately reflect the diagnostic patterns in general clinical practice and fill an important gap in literature.
They ask for further studies to investigate the mechanisms behind the observed differences and say differences in these measures due to race / ethnicity, sex and socio -economic status in the neighborhood should motivate future measures to promote health equipment.
These results are consistent with findings from other studies, but the use of routine data to discover underlying trends offers challenges, say British researchers in a linked editorial.
They point out, for example, that since the marginalized minorities are under-represented in Medicare Fee-For-Service plans, real inequalities per area deprivation index are probably greater than those reported. Better health monitoring, greater consciousness and diagnosis At an earlier stage, figures can also result in the more favored groups, so that socio -economic inequalities are further masked.
As such, they say that these findings “not only emphasize the need for improving the services for people who live with dementia in communities where a higher incidence and prevalence can be expected, but also the need to implement policy for improving the risk factor profiles about populations in early life.”
Source:
Journal Reference:
Blass, B., et Alt Alto. (2025). Incidence and prevalence of dementia among American medicare beneficiaries, 2015-21: population-based study. BMJ. doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2024-083034.