By Elizabeth O'Brien
It’s hard to find a family untouched by dementia. And it’s going to get even harder by 2040, when a projected 9.1 million Americans will have the condition, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Dementia is an umbrella term for cognitive decline that impairs an older person’s daily functioning. Alzheimer’s Disease is the most common form of dementia, although strokes and other ailments can also lead to the condition. Each case of dementia costs $41,000 to $56,000 a year, the study found. That quickly adds up: by 2040, the overall cost will range from $379 billion to $511 billion, from $159 billion to $215 billion in 2010.
In an interview with The New York Times, lead study author Michael D. Hurd, of the RAND Corporation, acknowledged that his team captured dementia’s hard numbers, not its emotional toll. Alex Witchel brought her family’s painful struggle to life in an essay in the April/May issue of AARP magazine. A staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, Witchel writes how she and her family cycled through denial when her mother, a former psychology professor, developed dementia.
Finally Witchel writes, “ I stopped arguing. I stopped expecting [my father] to step up and fix it and stopped expecting myself to be infallible, all-knowing. It turned out that the fancy doctors, the expensive pills, the endless tests, my iron will, my reams of notes, my research, were all for naught. Dementia won. The only power I had left was to surround my mother with acceptance and kindness.”