Around one million Americans may develop some form of dementia every year by 2060, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Medicine. The latest forecast suggests a massive and harrowing increase from annual cases predicted for 2020, in which approximately 514,000 adults in the U.S. were estimated to be diagnosed with dementia—an umbrella term that describes several neurological conditions that affect memory and cognition.

The new study also showed the lifetime risk of dementia increased progressively with older age. They estimated that after age 55, the lifetime risk of dementia is 42 percent, and continues to rise sharply to 56 percent after age 85. Groups that showed greater lifetime risks (between 44 and 59 percent after age 55) were Black adults, women and people who carried the allele APOE e4: this variation of the gene APOE, which codes for the protein apolipoprotein E, increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia, but the study focused on all forms.

“I knew the total lifetime risk would be higher than previous 20-year-old estimates,” says Josef Coresh, senior author of […]