Better health awareness may have led to fall in dementia rates

Health-conscious men may be responsible for a reduction in rates of alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia over the past 20 years.

Despite fears of a dementia “tsunami” as people live longer, incidence of the condition has fallen by a fifth in England.

There are thought to be 40,000 fewer new cases of dementia each year in the UK than there would have been had the trend of two decades ago continued.

The improvement is almost entirely driven by men, but why remains an unanswered question.

One possibility could be that men have become better at looking after themselves. Fewer men smoke and their hearts and arteries are in better shape, although obesity levels remain high.

Better education and more awareness of the importance of exercise may also be contributing factors.

Professor Carol Brayne, director of the Institute of Public Health at Cambridge University, who co-led the study, said: “It may be that those things are playing a role. I know that others have suggested that men are becoming a bit more like women in terms of their health patterns.”

The findings, reported in the journal Nature Communications, are from the Cognitive Function and Ageing Study (CFAS).

Between 1991 and 1994, researchers assessed 7,500 men and women aged 65 and over and conducted repeat interviews two years later to measure dementia incidence.

Two decades later, the process was repeated with a new group of roughly the same number of participants. The results showed that rates of all kinds of dementia had fallen by 20% between the two dates, but women’s incidence remained almost unchanged.