Dementia Life Expectancy Varies Significantly by Age at Diagnosis

Dementia Life Expectancy Varies Significantly by Age at Diagnosis
Dementia Life Expectancy Varies Significantly by Age at Diagnosis Credit | Getty images

United States: It is a clock that is ticking for families with dementia and the remaining years that they are going to be alive depend on their age.

Key Role in Life Expectancy

Researchers have pointed out that while average life expectancy varies with the type of dementia, new evidence review shows that it main depends on the age at which one is diagnosed, as reported by HealthDay.

Dementia is estimated to shorten the remaining life span by approximately 2 years when diagnosed at the age of 85, 3 to 4 years at the age of 80, and up to 13 years at the age of 65, according to the researchers’ findings as published Jan. 8, 2021., in The BMJ.

Implications for Care and Planning

“Approximately one third of the remaining lifespan was spent in nursing homes, with more than half of the patients transferring to a nursing home within 5 years of dementia diagnosis,” the researchers led by senior researcher Dr. Frank Wolters, of the Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands said.

One of the issues in dementia is how to prepare for a person’s care after being diagnosed with the degenerative brain disease, and an individual’s plans can depend on the prognosis as to how long he or she is likely to live with the condition, the researchers stated in notes.

Global incidence of dementia, according to the researchers, is 65 years and above; and approximately ten million individuals are diagnosed with the condition annually. However, existing estimates of remaining life years differ significantly and have not been adjusted for over a decade.

Life Expectancy and Nursing Home Admission

In order to conduct this evidence review, the authors synthesized data from 261 previous studies involving over 5.5 million people with dementia. These studies were from across the globe.

Altogether, data suggest that the duration of life left is dependent on age at diagnosis.

For instance, if diagnosed at 65, the average man has only 6 years to live while the average woman has 8.

Thus, the data presented demonstrate that by 85, male patients with diagnosed dementia will survive less than 2.5 years, and female patients – less than 5 years.

Symptoms of dementia: Patients spend an average of more than 3 years from diagnosis to entering a nursing home; one-third (37%) were admitted within three years; and more than half (57%) within five years, investigators found.

Outcomes also showed that Asian patients survived longer with dementia, and patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease survived longer than those with other forms of dementia.

“Although hard to fully capture at a group level, our results suggest time to nursing home admission might be somewhat shorter in Europe and the US, compared with elsewhere,” researchers wrote, as reported by HealthDay.

The Need for More Precise Prognosis

Such studies give essential information about prognosis and treatment for patients and their close ones, as stated in an editorial signed by Bjørn Heine Strand, a research professor at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

“Although the understanding of survival with dementia has advanced substantially, the complexities of predicting the timeline for nursing home admission persist,” the editorial says. “To enhance future healthcare services and optimize quality of life for people with dementia and their families, it is crucial that we continue to strive for more precise, context-sensitive insights.”