Predicting our dementia burden

Dr Dermot Walsh, former Inspector of Mental Hospitals, examines the importance of having plausible projections of the prevalence of dementia, and questions the emergence of the clinical entity of ‘pre-dementia’. Dementia has been getting a good deal of media attention recently, much of it of an alarmist nature. A recent item in The Irish Times Health Supplement (July 29, 2014) on dementia quotes Gerry Martin of the Alzheimer Society of Ireland complaining that GPs tell patients that memory problems are part of “natural ageing”. Martin is surely mistaken to dismiss this simple point as “fundamentally wrong” (bit.ly/dementia-irishtimes). More importantly, it…