MONDAY, Oct. 19, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- The age- and sex-standardized dementia incidence is 9.7 per 1,000 person-years at risk, with higher incidence in women than men, according to a study published online Oct. 12 in JAMA Neurology.
Ashleigh S. Vella, Ph.D., from the University of New South Wales in Australia, and colleagues examined dementia incidence rates by age and sex worldwide using retrospective community-based cohorts from the Cohort Studies of Memory in an International Consortium (COSMIC). Longitudinal COSMIC cohort studies with a clinically based diagnosis of dementia were eligible; individual participant-level data were included from 22 longitudinal cohorts (38,418 participants) spanning 18 countries or territories across six continents.
The researchers found that 3,001 participants developed dementia across 287,632 person-years at risk. Per 1,000 person-years at risk, age- and sex-standardized incidence was 9.7. Higher age-standardized incidence was seen in women than men (10.6 versus 8.6). Compared with high-income countries, standardized incidence was higher in low- and middle-income countries (13.6 versus 8.3). Assuming constant incidence over time, applying age- and sex-specific rates to the projected 2050 population yielded 24.7 million new cases.
"The other group that's driving this is the low- and middle-income countries that face this disproportionate burden," Liron Sinvani, M.D., from the Northwell Institute for Healthy Aging and the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York, said in a statement. "The countries that have the fewest resources for diagnosis, treatment, and caregiving are the ones that are going to be facing this enormous wave of dementia cases. And they have very limited infrastructure to respond."
Several authors disclosed ties to the biopharmaceutical industry.
