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Posted on Jan 23, 2006, 8 a.m.
By Bill Freeman
A group of researchers from Britain, Australia, Brazil, the United States, China, Japan, and Sweden has published a report in the British medical journal The Lancet arguing that barring advances in treatment the number of people in the world suffering dementia due to aging will more than triple by the year 2040.
A group of researchers from Britain, Australia, Brazil, the United States, China, Japan, and Sweden has published a report in the British medical journal The Lancet arguing that barring advances in treatment the number of people in the world suffering dementia due to aging will more than triple by the year 2040. (requires free registration)
We have generated expert consensus estimates of age-specific dementia prevalence for different world regions using the Delphi technique. We estimate that 24 million people have dementia today and that this amount will double every 20 years to 42 million by 2020 and 81 million by 2040, assuming no changes in mortality, and no effective prevention strategies or curative treatments. Of those with dementia, 60% live in developing countries, with this number rising to 71% by 2040. The rate of increase in numbers of people with dementia is predicted to be three to four times higher in developing areas than in developed regions.
Obviously, lots of advances in medical treatments will occur in the interim. Some advances will increase longevity by keeping old bodies alive longer. Those sorts of advances will increase the number of people with longevity by allowing more people to live to an age where their brains fail. On the other hand, medical advances that prevent Alzheimer's Disease and other causes of dementia will surely be developed as well.
Prevention of brain aging is much harder than rejuvenation of the rest of the body. The reason for this is simple: We will develop ways to grow and build replacement parts for most of the body. But our brains hold our identities. We can't get a brain replaced with a younger brain without replacing ourselves with a different person. Now, maybe some day nanotechnological methods will allow us to replicate our memories in another brain and that new brain will think it is us. Though I would not view a copy of me as being me. But given such advanced technologies why not instead apply those nano-devices to instead fully repair the brain we already have?
The costs of millions of demented people are enormous. People with early onset Alzheimers are lost from the workforce. Regardless of age of onset the costs of caring for each patient are high because the patients gradually lose the ability to care for themselves. Both families and governments shoulder large portions of the costs. The burden per working person is rising as the average age of populations rise. Taxes will go up in all the developed countries in the next decade and levels of service will simultaneously be cut in order to pay for the growing population of old folks.
These costs of caring for the demented and of old people suffering from other maladies are a strong argument for a huge increase of government funding for research to develop rejuvenation therapies (what Aubrey de Grey calls Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence or SENS). Once developed such therapies will become far cheaper to administer than the costs of caring for an aging population. People who are too worn out to work will, once rejuvenated, be able to return to work. Many will once again become net payers of taxes rather than net recipients of taxes paid by younger workers.
Brain rejuvenation combined with technologies to boost cognitive function will cause an enormous increase in average human productivity. The increases in human productivity will pay back the costs of medical research many times over.
We are going to pay for the aging population one way or another. I prefer to pay for it by solving the underlying problem: reverse aging. That way of paying for it requires larger government expenditures in the short to medium run but will avoid much much larger government expenditures in the long run while simultaneously allowing us to become young again.
