What impact may Alzheimers disease have upon the UK ageing population and economy in the future?

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Hamda Ahmed

What impact may Alzheimer’s disease have upon the UK ageing population and economy in the future?

In this essay I will be investigating what impact Alzheimer’s disease may have upon the UK’s ageing population and economy in the future.

Alzheimer’s disease is a physical disease of the brain. This disease is caused by parts of the brain wasting away which damages the structure of the brain and how it works.  This leads to symptoms like loss of memory, mood change, communication problems and reasoning. This disease mostly affects the UK ageing population, there has been an increase in Alzheimer’s cases because there is more older people and that increases the number of individual with the disease for example, 1 in 14 people over 65 years of age is affected by Alzheimer’s and 1in 6 over the age of 80 (REF 1). This shows that the risk increases with age, so the older you get the more chance you have of developing the condition. Over 820,000 people in the UK live with Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia, costing the economy 23 billion pounds per year (REF 2). As of 2010, there are an estimated 35.6 million people with dementia worldwide. This number will nearly double every 20 years, to an estimated 65.7 million in 2030, and 115.4 million in 2050. Much of the increase will be in developing countries. Already 58% of people with dementia live in developing countries, but by 2050 this will rise to 71 %. (REF 3). As the ageing population increases there will more Alzheimer’s patients and then the economy will have to accommodate them.

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Make dementia a national priority:

I think it is economically sustainable to make dementia a national and social care priority because if the disease is not publicly stated than the other recommendation won’t be possible. Care takers won’t know how to attend and care for the people with the disease. Making this disease public makes people aware of it and that could help with the fund rising. The stakeholders who would agree with this include politics like Prime Minister David Cameron who said This is simply a terrible disease, and that if we don’t make it a national priority it would lead ...

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