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The public eye is becoming more and more aware of the frustrating situation with Alzheimer’s disease. The Alzheimer’s Association provides some scary facts surrounding the disease: it’s currently the only disease on the top 10 list of killers of Americans that has no cure or even a method to slow its effect on the human brain. Currently 5.4 million Americans are dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, with 96% of those Americans aged 65 or older. Estimates of the disease’s grasp on the world are not waning by any stretch of the imagination, where experts project the disease’s growth to increase by 196.3% over the next 37 years to 16 million Americans. On a worldwide scale, 35 million individuals are afflicted with a form of dementia, with Alzheimer’s accounting for about half of those cases.
The numbers associated with Alzheimer’s are haunting. Almost half of all Americans aged 85 or older have Alzheimer’s and 1 in every 8 Americans aged 65 or older falls victim to the same fate. If that doesn’t raise the hairs on the back of your neck, then this next fact will: every 68 seconds another American develops Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s is a disease that requires the patient to be monitored by professionals or loved ones on a regular basis. The disease causes people to become disoriented, creating a scenario where the patient can wander off and not be able to find their way back home or experience dangerous falls or simply forget to eat. In extreme conditions, unmonitored patients can be at a heightened risk of death; sadly, about 800,000 American Alzheimer’s patients are dealing with the disease without any support.
The previous numbers aren’t meant to discount the amount of support provided by families in the United States. In fact, about 15 million families and friends provided roughly 17 billion hours of support to their suffering loved ones—the estimated cost of this support is in the range of $200 billion. Because of the nature of the disease, many caregivers suffer greatly from depression and stress that have accounted for an additional $9 billion in healthcare costs.
The financial burden of the disease is substantial. The year 2012 expects costs related to Alzheimer’s patients to exceed $200 billion with Medicare or Medicaid covering about 70% of the bill. If a projection of the rise in Americans afflicted by Alzheimer’s by the year 2050 holds true, costs will be expected to rise to $1.1 trillion (in today’s dollars).
Increased complications of the disease arise when a patient suffers from additional medical problems. Alzheimer’s makes treating those problems much more complicated, thus costing Medicare an additional 81% to care for such individuals. This article comes courtesy Methodist Senior Home Care, a chicago senior agency.
