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A cheery, uplifting item for you if you've got a minute. I'm being ironic by the way - because while you may not have thought of dementia as a terminal disease, that in fact is what it is - reinforced by new research which has found that the number of years someone with dementia survives, is about half what most experts have assumed. The general view is that a person diagnosed with dementia has a life expectancy of about six years. But a Canadian group of researchers weren't so sure about this, because there's a fairly well known phenomenon in studies of survival with any condition. It's that unless you're careful, people with severe forms of the disease which lead to rapid death can be missed, because they simply don't live long enough to get into the study. And so it was in a large group of elderly Canadians being followed with dementia. When the researchers corrected their figures for people with rapidly progressive forms of dementia, the life expectancy dropped to around three and a half years. This doesn't mean that dementia is suddenly dramatically different - it's just a recognition that some people decline very quickly with it. It may be that's because dementia isn't just one disease - it's probably many, most of which are yet to be discovered. Another question is, why would you think that someone might die of dementia at all? Most people think that it just raises the risk of dying of any cause - perhaps with things like pneumonia being a bit more common. The reality is no-one really knows for sure what people with dementia die of.
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