Health Promot Chronic Dis Prev Can. 2016 Oct;36(10):231-232.
Dementia prevalence estimates vary among population-based studies, depending on the definitions of dementia, methodologies and data sources and types of costs they use. A common approach is needed to avoid confusion and increase public and stakeholder confidence in the estimates. Since 1994, five major studies have yielded widely differing estimates of dementia prevalence and monetary costs of dementia in Canada. These studies variously estimated the prevalence of dementia for the year 2011 as low as 340 170 and as high as 747 000. The main reason for this difference was that mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was not consistently included in the projections. The estimated monetary costs of dementia for the same year also varied, from $910 million to $33 billion. This discrepancy is largely due to three factors: (1) the lack of agreed-upon methods for estimating financial costs; (2) the unavailability of prevalence estimates for the various stages of dementia (mild, moderate and severe), which directly affect the amount of money spent; and (3) the absence of tools to measure direct, indirect and intangible costs more accurately. Given the increasing challenges of dementia in Canada and around the globe, reconciling these differences is critical for developing standards to generate reliable information for public consumption and to shape public policy and service development.
基于人群的研究中，痴呆症的患病率估计因痴呆症定义、方法学以及数据来源和使用的成本类型而异。需要采用一种通用方法来避免混淆，并提高公众和利益相关者对这些估计的信心。自 1994 年以来，五项主要研究对加拿大的痴呆症患病率和痴呆症货币成本得出了广泛不同的估计。这些研究对 2011 年痴呆症的患病率的估计各不相同，最低的为 340170，最高的为 747000。造成这种差异的主要原因是轻度认知障碍（MCI）并未一致纳入预测。同年，痴呆症的货币成本估计也有所不同，从 9.1 亿美元到 330 亿美元不等。这种差异主要归因于三个因素：（1）缺乏用于估算财务成本的既定方法；（2）各种痴呆阶段（轻度、中度和重度）的患病率估计值不可用，这直接影响支出金额；（3）缺乏更准确地衡量直接、间接和无形成本的工具。鉴于痴呆症在加拿大乃至全球的挑战不断增加，协调这些差异对于制定标准以生成供公众使用的可靠信息以及塑造公共政策和服务发展至关重要。
