Costantino Iadecola, MD: The Cost of Dementia's Increasing Prevalence

“If dementia was an industry, a company, its business production would be similar to the gross domestic product of Canada, to give you an idea of how much this costs the general population.”

With an increasing number of aging patients in the United States and the world, dementia has become one of the most serious and widespread medical conditions ever. According to the World Health Organization, 5.2% of those over the age of 65 have dementia globally, accounting for roughly 50 million people.¹

Costantino Iadecola, MD, the Anne Parrish Titzell Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, knows this all too well. His work in dementia extends back as far as the early 1980s.

With prediction models estimating the prevalence of dementia to more than double in the next few decades, Iadecola knows there is work to be done. Not only for the sake of the patients but their caregivers and family as well, as the cost of caring for these patients has only grown.

At the American Neurological Association’s 143rd Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, Iadecola sat with NeurologyLive to discuss the increasing prevalence of dementia, as well as what is being done globally to address it.

REFERENCE

1. Prince M, et al. World Alzheimer’s Report 2015, The Global Impact of Dementia: An analysis of prevalence, incidence, cost, and trends. Alzheimer’s Disease International.