Medical Biomathematics and Biometrics Commons^™

Projections Of Alzheimer's Disease In The United States And The Public Health Impact Of Delaying Disease Onset., Ron Brookmeyer, Sarah Gray, Claudia Kawas

Ron Brookmeyer

OBJECTIVES: The goal of this study was to project the future prevalence and incidence of Alzheimer's disease in the United States and the potential impact of interventions to delay disease onset.

METHODS: The numbers of individuals in the United States with Alzheimer's disease and the numbers of newly diagnosed cases that can be expected over the next 50 years were estimated from a model that used age-specific incidence rates summarized from several epidemiological studies, US mortality rates, and US Bureau of the Census projections.

RESULTS: in 1997, the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease in the United States was 2.32 million (range: …

Predicting Future Years Of Healthy Life For Older Adults, Paula Diehr

Paula Diehr

Cost-effectiveness studies often need to compare the cost of a program to the lifetime benefits of the program, but estimates of lifetime benefits are not routinely available, especially for older adults. We used data from two large longitudinal studies of older adults (ages 65-100) to estimate transition probabilities from one health state to another, and used those probabilities to estimate the mean additional years of healthy life that an older adult of specified age, sex, and health status would experience. We found, for example, that 65-year-old women in excellent health can expect 16.8 years of healthy life in the future, …