China faces dementia crisis
Via Bloomberg News
In China, there are only about 300 qualified physicians to treat more than 9 million dementia sufferers. The shortage is overwhelming families and threatening resources from an already stretched welfare system as the country ages.
“If someone is going to have Alzheimer’s, China is a rough place to have it,” said Benjamin Shobert, managing director of Rubicon Strategy Group, which advises companies on the senior-care market. “Aging will be the biggest crisis of the century for China and Alzheimer’s is at the crux of the problem.” China has the world’s largest group of Alzheimer’s sufferers, according to a 2013 article in the medical journal Lancet.
Although countries from the U.S. to France also struggle with Alzheimer’s, the stakes are higher in China, where the numbers are poised to balloon as the population ages and rapid industrialization boosts risk factors from pollution to diabetes. Life expectancy in China has increased seven years to 76 since 1990. The flip side of that progress is that an aging population has combined with rapid modernization to fuel a rise in mental illness from depression to Alzheimer’s even as the nation has directed only limited resources toward the elderly. There were an estimated 5.7 million Alzheimer’s patients in China in 2010, 53 percent higher than a decade earlier and twice as many as earlier estimated by the international health community, according to the June Lancet study.