Dementia cost expected to more than double by 2040: study

[xchrom]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/03/dementia-cost-expected-to-more-than-double-by-2040-study/



Dementia costs more each year in the United States than cancer or heart disease, with annual costs ranging from $157 billion to $215 billion, according to a study released Wednesday.

Much of the costs come from long-term care giving, and the price tag is expected to more than double by 2040, said the study by the non-profit RAND Corporation in the April 4 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

“The economic burden of caring for people in the United States with dementia is large and growing larger,” said Michael Hurd, the study’s lead author and a senior economist at RAND.

“Our findings underscore the urgency of recent federal efforts to develop a coordinated plan to address the growing impact of dementia on American society.”

[undergroundpanther]

1. weird thought

Seems dementia is becoming more common,even in younger people,my sister has it,she's 56,it's not severe yet.
I wonder how much has to do with 'mad cow' coming home to roost? because apparently agribusiness does everything it can to hide what they do to cows and how meat is processed,how many years before it got reported has mad cow been in the food supply?

[bemildred]

2. It's the crap we eat. The cheap garbage we eat.

Long on calories, short on nutrition. The older you get, the less you can get away with, and the more you need to pay attention to what you consume and how you cook it.

The mind is one of the first things to go, right after your eyes and your knees.

You can't sit around on your butt all day and eat 3000 calories of crap and expect to sail into old age with all your faculties intact.

[SheilaT]

3. I am convinced that there are a lot of hidden villains here.

The chemicals in diet soft drinks. The spray thing for cooking. The almost total lack of actual fresh fruits and vegetables for so many people. Cakes made from mixes. The canned frosting for those cakes.

Some of it is rather subtle and seems to fly beneath the radar, so as my first two. After all, what woman do you know who doesn't drink diet soft drinks? Actually, I don't,, but I'm a very strange person that way. I hate it when cooking instructions tell you to use the spray fake thing for your pans.

I love to bake from scratch. Sometimes I make cookies or a cake and bring it to work to share (I live alone so can't consume all of what I love to bake) and it is so obvious that almost no one has ever had cookies or a cake not from a mix that it's both embarrassing and disheartening.

There are chemicals out there in the food that are so ubiquitous that it's frightening. Kind of like how in recent decades not a baby gets to be born that didn't have multiple ultrasounds before birth. Do you really think that those don't have a long term effect?

And vaccines. While they are in many ways good and wonderful, there are so many more given now than when I was a child (I'm 64) that surely there are some other effects besides preventing those diseases. And no matter where you come down on the vaccine debate, hopefully you will be as amused as I was when about four years ago when starting a new job, they wanted to know when I'd had my MMR vaccine. No vaccine, but I did have all those diseases, I said.

[bemildred]

4. Ha ha. Yeah, I had them all too. You can still see my smallpox scar.

The guys that cured polio should have gotten ALL THE MONEY we have given the Pentagon these last 60s years and we would have all been much better off. The whole world would have been better off.

I'm not sure ultrasound is all that bad, it would depend on accumulated exposure, and I would think ti would take a lot. But as with vaccines, I do think they should be less cavalier about what they use, not every disease should be thwarted just because we can, or it pays well.