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Is Alzheimer's disease more common now than it used to be?

To the extent that we are all living longer, Alzheimer’s disease is indeed more prevalent. Otherwise, this question is difficult to answer because careful surveys of Alzheimer's disease were not conducted in the past. For many years, society accepted memory problems in the elderly as normal. “Alzheimer’s disease” was a term reserved for those unusual cases when an individual shows extreme memory problems and disorientation before the age of 65.

As more autopsies were performed on the so-called “normal” older persons, we began to find that a large majority of those that had mental deficits showed microscopic changes in their brains like those of the younger victims of "Alzheimer’s disease." So physicians and researchers began to lump these two classes of patients together and look for common causes. Supporting this revised definition are recent statistics showing that among those who are over 95 years of age the incidence of Alzheimer’s is actually lower than among persons 75-90 years old, demonstrating that dementia is not an inevitable consequence of the aging process.

Steven W. Barger

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