22 June 2025, Cairo, Egypt – June is Alzheimer’s and Mind Consciousness Month, devoted to elevating consciousness about all types of dementia.
Worldwide, dementia is the seventh main reason for demise and a serious contributor to incapacity. The bulk (61%) of the 55 million individuals residing with dementia – a quantity that’s anticipated to extend to roughly 78 million by 2030 – stay in low- and middle-income international locations, underscoring the pressing want to lift consciousness and advocate for higher care, help and prevention methods. Within the World Well being Group (WHO) Japanese Mediterranean Area round 2.3 million individuals stay with dementia, and it’s the 14th main reason for demise.
Dementia is an umbrella time period for a number of illnesses that have an effect on reminiscence and different cognitive talents and behaviours that intervene with an individual’s capability to keep up their day by day actions. It’s a progressive and persistent situation in which there’s disturbance of mind features equivalent to reminiscence, pondering, judgment, orientation, calculation, language, studying capability and comprehension. It’s typically preceded by a decline in motivation, deteriorating social behaviour and emotional management. Alzheimer’s illness is a selected kind of dementia characterised by progressive reminiscence loss and cognitive decline. Whereas the strongest identified threat issue for dementia is age it isn’t a standard a part of ageing.
Ignorance and understanding of dementia results in stigmatization and limitations to prognosis and correct care.
The influence of dementia extends far past the particular person with dementia. It impacts carers, household and society at massive. In 2019, the estimated financial value of dementia was US$ 1.3 trillion, equal to 1.5% of worldwide gross home product. Within the Japanese Mediterranean Area it was US$ 31.2 billion. The worldwide financial value is predicted to greater than double by 2030, reaching US$ 2.8 trillion.
Round 45% of instances of dementia are doubtlessly preventable by addressing 14 modifiable threat elements throughout the life course. Within the Japanese Mediterranean Area, WHO advocates for a complete method to dementia care that prioritizes the mixing of dementia into broader well being and social programmes, leveraging low-cost, high-impact methods, funding in consciousness campaigns to scale back stigma, and dementia threat discount actions together with way of life/behaviour interventions for noncommunicable well being circumstances, cognitive coaching and early detection and therapy.
The Global action plan on the public health response to dementia 2017–2025 supplies the blueprint for Member States to create a world through which dementia is prevented, and the place individuals who have dementia and their carers obtain the help they should stay a life with which means and dignity.
Related hyperlinks:
Global action plan on the public health response to dementia 2017–2025
2024 Eastern Mediterranean Regional Workshop – Implementation of the Dementia Global Action Plan
