Numbers related to Alzheimer's are indeed frightening.

By the year 2050, 106 million people worldwide will have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease—quadruple today’s 26 million. These numbers came from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a presentation to a recent Alzheimer’s Association Conference in Washington, D.C.

The rate of the disease per 100,000 senior adults is only increasing slightly which can be attributed mostly to our improving ability to diagnose Alzheimer’s—the real driving factor in this staggering number is the simple increase in the world’s population of older people. The United Nations Population Division is projecting the number of people at least 80 years old will increase by a factor of 3.7 during this same time frame.

Furthermore, the Johns Hopkins folks estimate over 40% of these Alzheimer’s patients will need high-level care equivalent to that of a nursing home. The researchers apparently didn’t have a calculator with enough zeros to estimate the worldwide costs of this care. But using a modest figure of $25,000, the editors at ELDR calculate the annual cost at $1.15 trillion, more than the current estimated total cost of the Iraqi War.

In 2005, worldwide dementia treatment bill was $315.4 billion, which is higher than the total budget of all but eight of the world's countries -- the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, China and Spain, the researchers said.

According to the study’s authors, if the medical community could devise an intervention strategy to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s by as little as one year the prevalence of the disease in 2050 would be 12 million fewer cases.

One interesting fact is the largest increase in the prevalence of Alzheimer’s will occur in Asia, where 48 percent of the world’s cases currently reside. The number of case there is expected to grow from 13 million today to 62 million plus in 2050.

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