Has anybody heard the statistics on dementia/ Alzheimer's in our future? It's not good! Why is it running rampant?

I also feel like ADHD and such are more common now. Maybe we just live in a time where everyone wants and needs a diagnosis and reason.. before we just dealt with it. I know so many parents now with boys who have ADHD , where as before they were "just being boys" Not saying that was better.. just an observation

My grandmother was cognitively impaired, but she never counted in dementia statistics ... she was senile. Partly we have much more accurate diagnosis statistics today.

Something I’ve been pondering lately is the long term consequences of too many pharmaceuticals.

For instance-

A couple of years ago I was discussing my life long insomnia problem with my doctor.

I made the comment that having to get up to pee twice a night didn’t help matters.
My doctor offered to write me a prescription for a drug that mutes/reduces the feeling of - the urge - to pee.

I said no thanks saying I didn’t think it was a good idea to confuse the brain/body function relationship by artificial means, ie drugs. He seemed amused by my comment and assured me “it’s completely safe”.

What the doctor didn’t know was that I was thinking about my mother - who was in a nursing home with dementia, incontinence etc.

My mom had always had a weak bladder and was forever looking for a fix - going so far as to having Botox injected into her bladder.

Now mom was completely incontinent. In fact, the bladder incontinence came on prior to the dementia. And really, with her bladder history it was no surprise.

But still I wonder - is it a good idea to take meds that alter or override the brain? I’m not going all Tom Cruise on the whole thing - but we take drugs to calm us when our brain wants to be anxious. Drugs to make us happy when our brain wants to be depressed. Drugs to tell us we don’t have to pee - when yeah, I gotta pee.

Just something I’ve been pondering - as it related to dementia...

I am glad you brought this topic up. Of course, due to medical advances, people are living longer. BUT.... It seems to me that I do not remember ever being around very elderly people who had dementia or alzheimers. I would love to see some data that really shows that the condition is more prevalent....it sure seems like it.

My grandfather was "senile" too, (probably vascular dementia since he had a stroke at some point) he died at the grand old age of 81(?). My mom's mind was in excellent shape until she was in her mid 90's... the statistics seem to increase exponentially with every decade you live.

None of mom's siblings had dementia but then none lived as long as she and none of them had easy passings

Her parents had heart problems and passed at about 80

I still attribute much of her dementia to bad falls as she didn't even take a BP med until she was about 80

People are living longer and what was once considered just getting old or being "senile" is now classified as dementia. Same with autism. A lot of the increase has to do with reclassification and people that weren't labeled as having dementia or autism are now.

Let's not forget, the first wave of baby boomers are now seniors. I'm part of the first wave and am in my early 70's. And there were a lot of us born in the mid to late 1940's, after the military came home from World War II.

My best guess: We are living longer, as others have said, though to what purpose I don't know. What's the point of prolonging life with daily loss of brain cells? Beats me. But that's a whole other topic.

Another suggestion is a change in expectations. It used to be that families expected a mental decline in the elderly. This was not seen as dementia so much as "senility," a normal expectation in old age. Grandma repeats herself. Grandpa imagines stuff. It's just "old age." Now, we get diagnoses of multiple manifestations of dementia. Maybe these diseases were always there but were called something else. I remember it wasn't until the 1970's that I'd ever even heard of Alzheimer's.

I, like many others here, believe that we just know more about it now and that more people are living beyond where they would naturally have lived, even a decade ago. My FIL has Lewy Body Dementia. However, he had a heart attack 10 years ago. He ended up spending two months in the hospital, 6 bypasses and a replacement valve put in. The advancement of medicine helped him survive a health crisis that was not possible even 20 years ago. I cherish the last 10 years we've had with him and he had some really good times in those years. However, he is now suffering.
Like many other health maladies, I don't think any of them have gotten more prevalent, I think we just live longer and have greater access to statistics than we did when our parents were young.