Remember to stay positive

Joan Presky worries about dementia. Her mother lived with Alzheimer's disease for 14 years, the last seven in a memory-care residence, and her maternal grandmother developed dementia, too. “I’m 100% convinced that this is in my future,” said Presky, 70, a retired lawyer in Thornton, Colorado.

- PAULA SPAN

Last year, she spent almost a full day with a neuropsychologist, undergoing an extensive evaluation. The results indicated that her short-term memory was fine — she found this “shocking and comforting” — and that she tested average in above in every cognitive category but one.

“She said, ‘Relax, Joan. I expect Alzheimer’s was like,’ she said of her mother’s long decline. “The memory of what she went through is profound for me.”

The prospect of dementia, which encompasses Alzheimer’s disease and a number of other cognitive disorders, so frightens Americans that a recent study projecting steep increases in cases over the next three decades drew enormous public attention.

The researchers’ findings, published in January in JAMA Internal Medicine, even showed up on a scene on the Weekend Update segment on Saturday Night Live.

“Dementia is a devastating condition, and it’s very much related to the oldest ages,” said Dr Josef Coresh, director of the Optimal Aging Institute at NYU Langone Health and the senior author of the study. “The globe is getting older.”

Now the findings are being challenged by other dementia researchers who say, wait, and while increases are coming, they will be far smaller than Coresh and his co-authors predicted. Using data from about 15,000 Americans older than 55, collected at four research clinics around the country from 1993 through 2020, Coresh’s team projected a lifetime dementia risk much higher than previous studies had: 42%, although most of that risk didn’t emerge until after age 85.

The higher lifetime number probably reflected the study’s reliance on a more diverse sample than earlier researchers had used, Coresh said, and more dementia cases identified through in-depth questionnaires, regular phone calls, medical records and death certificates.