The Cost of Dementia: Worse Than We Thought
Dementia’s financial impact on the U.S. economy in 2010 was around $109 billion, reported researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. That figure largely consists of the costs of nursing-home care and home-based care, and it will likely double by 2040 as the population ages, according to the study.
That financial burden becomes even heavier if informal care, such as care provided by family members at home, is included. With those figures, the study found that the total cost of dementia in 2010 was between $157 billion and $215 billion.
This makes dementia one of the most costly diseases to society, the researchers write. As Stephen Hall reported for MIT Technology Review in October 2012 (see “The Dementia Plague”), the growing dementia problem could bankrupt the healthcare system if scientists are uanble to find a way to treat or delay dementing diseases.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.