More than 57.4 million people have dementia worldwide, including over 12.7 million in Europe – and that burden is only expected to grow in the coming decades.
But precise, up-to-date estimates on how long patients can expect to live after they’ve been diagnosed are hard to come by, and life expectancy appears to vary greatly depending on patients’ location, age, gender, and other factors.
For the new analysis, published in The BMJ, Dutch researchers assessed data from 261 studies published between 1984 and 2024, spanning more than five million people with the neurodegenerative disease.