Risk and Future Burden
06/02/2026 21:08:29 +0000
Risk and future burden of dementia in the United States
Dementia affects more than 6 million Americans and accounts for more than 100,000 deaths each year. Knowing people's lifetime risk of dementia can lead to improved prevention efforts. It can also inform public health planning by generating projections of future cases.
Previous estimates of lifetime dementia risk in the United States are 11-14% for men and 19-23% for women. But these are based on older data in which dementia wasn't reliably documented and early-stage cases were often missed. These data were also typically limited to non-Hispanic White populations.
A research team led by Drs. Josef Coresh at New York University Grossman School of Medicine and Michael Fang at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health generated updated estimates of lifetime dementia risk across different subsets of the population. They also projected the number of people who would be newly diagnosed with dementia in the U.S. between 2020 and 2060. Results appeared in Nature Medicine on January 13, 2025.
Cited Source: National Institutes of Health
References
Lifetime risk and projected burden of dementia. Fang M, Hu J, Weiss J, Knopman DS, Albert M, Windham BG, Walker KA, Sharrett AR, Gottesman RF, Lutsey PL, Mosley T, Selvin E, Coresh J. Nat Med. 2025 Jan 13. doi: 10.1038/s41591-024-03340-9. Online ahead of print. PMID: 39806070.
Lifetime risk and projected burden of dementia. Fang M, Hu J, Weiss J, Knopman DS, Albert M, Windham BG, Walker KA, Sharrett AR, Gottesman RF, Lutsey PL, Mosley T, Selvin E, Coresh J. Nat Med. 2025 Jan 13. doi: 10.1038/s41591-024-03340-9. Online ahead of print. PMID: 39806070.
