Statistics about Alzheimer's disease Every American Needs to Know

Close to 5 million Americans are currently struggling with Alzheimer's disease. Researchers estimate that 10 percent of individuals over the age of 65 and 50 percent of individuals over the age of 85 have the disease. Americans are living longer, and an entire generation of Baby Boomers is heading into retirement. Accordingly, the number of Americans with Alzheimer's disease is expected to triple by 2050. Such a staggering number of Americans with Alzheimer's disease will entail an incredible financial burden on the healthcare system in this country. Today, the annual cost of caring for Americans with Alzheimer's disease is close to $100 billion, and American businesses lose close to $60 billion as a result of the disease. More than half of the $60 billion loss that businesses incur happens as a result of the difficulties caregivers face balancing their work and the needs of their loved ones. Caregivers shoulder an incredible financial burden themselves. Approximately 70 percent of Alzheimer's patients live at home at a cost of as much as $20,000 a year. Nursing homes, which are often necessary for patients in the last stages of the disease, cost an average of $42,000 a year.

Fiscal hardship is nothing, however, when compared to the physical, mental, and emotional hardships that Americans with Alzheimer's disease and their caregivers face. A reported 10 percent of Americans have a family member with the disease and as much as a third of Americans know someone with it. From a clinical standpoint, Alzheimer's disease leads to total cognitive impairment, loss of all functional ability and, ultimately, death. From a caregivers' standpoint, the disease slowly steals the mind of a loved one, leaving only a body behind. While Alzheimer's disease is a relatively slow process of degeneration, the disease cuts a patient's life expectancy from the time when they are diagnosed in half. For example, a sixty-eight year old patient who would have died at eighty-four is more likely to die at seventy-six. In addition, the final eight years of his or her life would have been spent slowly losing the ability to think, move and even smile.

A brief look at statistics illustrate that Alzheimer's disease isn't just a disease that affects old people. It affects everyone-black and white, young and old. The need for scientists to understand how to prevent, treat, or even cure the disease is critically important to the health of our nation and the world. While a cure for Alzheimer's remains as elusive as a cause, even delaying the start of disease symptoms by five years could cut the number of Americans with Alzheimer's disease in half by 2055. Figures such as these emphasize the importance of early detection. Recent research indicates that advanced technology, such as MRIs and PET scans, may allow physicians to identify structural changes in the brain associated with Alzheimer's disease before symptoms even begin, and other researchers are searching for markers of the disease in spinal and cerebral fluid. This year alone, the government calculated that it would spend over $600 million on Alzheimer's research. Hopefully, this amount will continue to increase so that eventually Alzheimer's disease can become a specter of the past.