The Rising Tide of Dementia?

The Rising Tide of Dementia?

By: Michael Smith  |  January 05, 2010

Every time I forget a word or stand in front of the open fridge looking for a coffee cup (it happens more often than I like to think about) my lovely and intelligent spouse asks unsympathetically: "How will we know when you're senile?" Well, good question. I do sometimes find myself halfway through a sentence with no idea what word I want. Worse, I sometimes have no memory of how the sentence started in the first place. I find that more and more routine activities happen without conscious thought, so if I skip a step, I wind up looking for a cup where the milk is kept. I'm pretty sure it's not pathology. Yet. I hope. But the future is pretty bleak, if not for me personally, then for society as a whole. We are an aging population and dementia is part of aging. I bring this up because a new report commissioned by the Alzheimer Society of Canada was made public this week (as a sort of New Year's present, if you will) and it estimates that the prevalence of Alzheimers and other dementias is going to more than double in the next 30 years, with costs rising by a factor of 10. That's up here in the Great White North. Your mileage may vary, although I see no reason why it should. The society -- in a report titled Rising Tide: The Impact of Dementa on Canadian Society -- says that right now, a person is diagnosed with dementia in Canada every five minutes. In 30 years, that will shrink to one every two minutes. The associated costs will be enormous. The society estimates the yearly cost will jump from $15 billion to $153 billion./.../