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Can Doctors Estimate Life Expectancy After a Dementia Diagnosis?

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

Medically reviewed by Carmen Pope, BPharm. Last updated on Jan 10, 2025.

FRIDAY, Jan. 10, 2025 -- The clock is running for people who’ve been diagnosed with dementia, but the time they have left depends on their age.

Average life expectancy for people with dementia is largely based on their age at diagnosis, researchers found in a new evidence review.

Dementia reduces life expectancy by about 2 years for those diagnosed at age 85, 3 to 4 years for those diagnosed at 80, and up to 13 years with a diagnosis at 65, researchers reported in a study published Jan. 8 in The BMJ.

“About one third of remaining life expectancy was lived in nursing homes, with more than half of people moving to a nursing home within five years after a dementia diagnosis,” concluded the team led by senior researcher Dr. Frank Wolters, a senior scientist in epidemiology with the Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

One of the challenges of dementia involves planning for a person’s care following diagnosis, and these plans can hinge on how long a person will live with the degenerative brain condition, researchers said in background notes.

Nearly 10 million people worldwide are diagnosed with dementia every year, researchers said. However, current life expectancy estimates vary widely, and haven’t been updated for more than a decade.

For this evidence review, researchers analyzed data from 261 prior studies involving more than 5.5 million people with dementia. These studies came from around the world.

Results show that age at diagnosis plays a factor in how long people have left.

For example, men have a little under 6 years left and women 8 years if they are diagnosed at age 65.

By 85, life expectancy following a dementia diagnosis drops to a little over 2 years for men and under 5 years for women, results show.

Average time to nursing home admission for a person with dementia was just over 3 years following diagnosis, with a third (37%) admitted after three years and more than half (57%) at 5 years, researchers said.

Results also indicated that survival with dementia was longer among Asian populations, and among people with Alzheimer’s disease compared with other forms of dementia.

“Although hard to fully capture at a group level, our results suggest time to nursing home admission might be somewhat shorter in Europe and the US, compared with elsewhere,” researchers wrote.

These sort of studies provide crucial data for patients and loved ones, according to an accompanying editorial co-written by Bjørn Heine Strand, a research professor with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

“Although the understanding of survival with dementia has advanced substantially, the complexities of predicting the timeline for nursing home admission persist,” the editorial says. “To enhance future healthcare services and optimize quality of life for people with dementia and their families, it is crucial that we continue to strive for more precise, context sensitive insights.”

Disclaimer: Statistical data in medical articles provide general trends and do not pertain to individuals. Individual factors can vary greatly. Always seek personalized medical advice for individual healthcare decisions.

© 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Posted January 2025

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