Every 3 seconds, one person on Earth is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Reports estimate that about 47 million individuals currently suffer from dementia, and that at the half of the century the number is expected to treble to 130 million.
It is estimated that 58% of all the people with dementia live in high developed countries, and that nearly half of them live in Asia. Researchers declared that if no medical innovations are to be made anytime soon, the disease could not be prevented and the number of those affected by it will most likely double in the next 20 years.
Marc Wrotmann, managing director of Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI), said that the rising global cases of dementia will soon pose severe challenges to health care systems all across the world.
Dementia, more commonly known as senility, is a mental disease causes a gradual decrease of a person’s ability to think or speak, and it often leads to complete memory loss. The unawareness of a person’s memory loss is one of the inevitable aspects of dementia.
Experts do not know why and at what stage of the disease this feature starts to develop but estimate that they are starting to lose awareness of their lack of memories up to 2 years before the condition installs.
Annually, in order to measure the thinking and memory abilities of those affected, thousands of tests are being conducted. One of the studies warns that the number of people with dementia is on the rise, and at an alarming rate. The average age of the subjects was 76, a little higher than the global average. The researchers also had the chance to examine the brain of 385 study participants who died during the study.
Although no decline was observed in the cases where the pathology was absent, one of the scientists came up with the theory that the disease is actually the desire of the elders to let their memories fade as they are approaching their death.
The scientists declared that their findings should emphasize why it is important for us to have family and friends to help us along the way in detecting the early symptoms of dementia as soon as possible.
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