Tag Archives: carecrisis
Dementia deaths more than double in a decade
The proportion of people dying of dementia has more than doubled in a decade, official figures show, and by 2021 one in eight of all deaths could be due to the brain disease.
Doctors now record dementia as the underlying cause of death in one in 13 people, up from about one in 33 a decade ago.
By Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent
2:09PM GMT 06 Nov 2012
Every tenth woman in England and Wales now dies of dementia (10.3 per cent), according to mortality figures for 2011 from the Office for National Statistics, up from 4.3 per cent in 2001.
In men, the proportion of deaths from dementia has risen from 2.0 to 5.2 per cent over the course of the decade.
Should these rises be sustained it will mean that by 2021 about 12 per cent of all deaths will be attributed to dementia.
Experts said the figures were a “scary” reminder of the scale of the dementia timebomb facing Britain.
