Alzheimer's disease statistics - prevalence and age

Professor Donna Wilcock discusses Alzheimer's disease in the light of increasing prevalence as the population ages.

Alzheimer’s disease is becoming more common, and the reason it’s becoming more common is that basically people are living longer. It’s still a known fact that the biggest risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease is age. So, by 80 years old, there is a reasonable percentage of the population that have Alzheimer’s at that age. The concern is that as the baby boomer generation starts to hit this age of onset for Alzheimer’s disease, which is basically 75 and up is when we see the increase in disease, that this is going to become a major public health problem. And we are going to have very large numbers by the time we hit 2050.