A problem for our age

摘要

The world is getting richer. But wealth brings its own burdens. Prosperous people live longer and old age carries a high risk of dementia - a condition that is so far neither preventable nor curable. In 2000, for example, 4.5% of the population of the United States was older than 65 years, and there were 411,000 new cases of Alzheimer's disease. Ten years on, those numbers had risen to 5.1% of the US population and 454,000 cases, according to the Alzheimer's Association in the United States. This same trend is happening across the world. In fact, when Alzheimer's disease is conflated with other dementias with similar clinical profiles, it covers an estimated 35.6 million people - around 0.5% of the global population. And these figures are about to get worse: the number of people with dementia is set to double in the next 20 years, according to the World Alzheimer Report 2010, a global assessment of the economic impact of dementia.