A Delve Into Dementia Demographics
A new study by researchers at UC San Francisco and Kaiser Permanente has concluded that age-related dementia is more prevalent among African-Americans and Native Americans than whites and other ethnicities.
Both organizations claim that the study is the most comprehensive on how dementia impacts Americans after the age of 65 based on racial background.
Researchers availed themselves of Kaiser's enormous database of electronic medical records. They studied the records of more than 274,000 Kaiser enrollees in Northern California from January 2000 through the end of 2013.
Although the incidence of dementia occurred at an unweighted average of 20.6 per 1,000 individuals studied, they varied widely across ethnic groups.
Among African-Americans, the rate was 26.6 cases per 1,000; 22.2 cases per 1,000 for American Indians/Alaskan Natives; 19.6 per 1,000 among Latinos; 19.3 per 1,000 for whites, and 15.2 per 1,000 among Asian-Americans.
“Most research on inequalities in dementia includes only one to two racial and ethnic groups, primarily whites and blacks,” said lead author Elizabeth Rose Mayeda, a UCSF postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology and biostatistics. “This is the only research that directly compares dementia for these six racial and ethnic groups, representing the true aging demographic of the United States in a single study population.”
According to the study, among those groups who reach the age of 65 dementia-free, 38% of African-Americans, 35% of American Indians/Alaskan Natives, 32% of Latinos, 30% of whites and 28% percent of Asian-Americans will develop dementia in the intervening years.
"Even in the lowest risk groups in the study, the lifetime risk of developing dementia is high — in every racial and ethnic group, over one in four people who survive to age 65 can expect to be diagnosed with dementia in their lifetime,” said Rachel Whitmer, principal investigator of the study and a Kaiser research scientist. “This study has major public health implications. If all individuals aged 65 or older had the same rate of dementia as Asian Americans, 190,000 cases of dementia would be prevented annually.”
The study was published in the most recent edition of Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
