Dementia Costs UK £23 billion a year

www.dementia2010.org Dementia 2010: The Economic Burden of Dementia and Associated Research Funding in the UK makes for interesting reading. The report, produced by the University of Oxford for the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, estimates that dementia costs the UK £23 billion per year. This cost is twice as much as cancer, three times as much as heart disease and four times as much as stroke.

The introduction to the report also provides a salutary reminder of what dementia really is “a group of symptoms caused by the gradual death of brain cells, leading to the progressive decline of functions such as memory, orientation, understanding, judgement, calculation, learning, language and thinking”, and “a terminal disease where patients are expected to live 3 to 9 years after diagnosis.”

Beneath these headlines figure lies some nuanced and important detail. For example of the £23 billion annual cost relating to dementia, 95% is defined as social care (55% borne by unpaid carers and 40% in institutional care costs), and only 5% in health care costs. The proportions in the three main other disease categories (cancer, heart disease, and stroke) are starkly different. All three have much higher health care costs and staggeringly smaller social care costs. For strokes social care costs account for 27% of the total, for cancer only 5% and for heart disease they are only 2%.

Such disparity reflects the acceptance of all three categories automatically as diseases to be treated and cared for within the NHS system and the positioning of dementia as a social rather than health care need and priority.

As well as the staggering cost, bear in mind that the vast majority of that ‘social care’ cost is borne directly and indirectly by individuals with dementia and their families paying for their own care and means tested. Despite the unambiguous definition of dementia as a “terminal disease” these figures reveal a clear bias within the system not to take dementia seriously as a disease to be cared for within the NHS with that treatment free at the point of delivery.