Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate of older adults living with dementia was decreasing. The pandemic accelerated that decline, however, due to an increase in deaths among older adults living with dementia, according to a University of Michigan study.
The study, co-authored by Vicki Freedman, PhD, of the University of Michigan, and consultant Jennifer Cornman, PhD, used data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study and found that the rate of dementia, in average yearly terms, declined at 2.8% from 2011 through 2019 and at 3.1% from 2011 through 2021.
Their results were published in the Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.
Experts generally have predicted an increase in the number of US older adults with dementia due to the large Baby Boom generation continuing to age. Baby boomers are turning 60 to 78 in 2024.
“This growth is likely to place additional pressures on already strained long term services care and support systems, including family members who provide the bulk of care to older adults with dementia and, consequently, may result in an upturn in adverse outcomes related to unmet care needs in later life,” the study authors said.
The study’s results, however, join a growing cohort of research finding a decline in dementia prevalence in the United States. This study adds to that research by analyzing the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the trend, finding the increase in mortality of older adults with dementia during the pandemic to be the driving force of the accelerating decline.
The NHATS data come from approximately 48,000 annual interviews conducted between 2011 to 2021 that included assessments of cognitive function; participants living in nursing homes were not eligible for a sample person interview. To prevent measurement errors, the study omitted nursing home residents from their sample but conducted a robustness check that found a steeper decline when they were included.
Forty-two percent of assisted living residents had a dementia diagnosis as of 2020, according to a federal report from December 2022 from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
In previous work studying the decline of dementia through 2015, Freedman attributed the trend to the better education of the large generation of older adults entering their 70s in the mid-2010s. This factor has less effect in the “post-COVID period,” however.
“The longer-term effects are still unclear, including the consequences of having an increasing share of the older population experiencing multiple bouts of COVID-19 infection or lingering health effects,” Freedman said. “These are important questions for future research to address.”
