Review Reveals Average Life Expectancy After Dementia Diagnosis

FRIDAY, Jan. 10, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Average life expectancy for patients with dementia ranges from 8.9 years after diagnosis at a mean age of 60 years for women to 2.2 years at a mean age of 85 years for men, according to a study published online Jan. 8 in The BMJ.

Chiara C. Brück, from the Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and colleagues conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine time to nursing home admission and death in people with dementia. Data were included from 261 eligible studies: 235 reported on survival among 5,553,960 participants and 79 reported on nursing home admission among 352,990 participants.

The researchers found that average life expectancy of people with dementia at time of diagnosis ranged from 5.7 and 8.0 years at age 65 years in men and women, respectively, to 2.2 and 4.5 years at age 85 years. Compared with men, women had shorter survival overall (mean difference, 4.1 years), which was attributable to later diagnosis in women. Compared with the United States and Europe, median survival was 1.2 to 1.4 years longer in Asia; compared with other types of dementia, median survival was 1.4 years longer for Alzheimer disease. Survival was longer in contemporary clinic-based studies, but not in community-based studies compared with studies before 2000. Overall, 51 percent of the heterogeneity in survival was explained by variation in reported clinical characteristics and study methodology. The median time to nursing home admission was 3.3 years; 13 percent of individuals were admitted in the first year after diagnosis, increasing to 57 percent at five years.

“This systematic review found that prognosis after a dementia diagnosis is highly dependent on patient, disease, and study characteristics, offering potential for individualized prognostic information and care planning,” the authors write.

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