World Alzheimer Report 2024

For over a decade, Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI) has been advocating for increased awareness of dementia across the world. Awareness is a nebulous concept, but an important one. Knowledge of dementia plays a key role in how the condition is understood by various stakeholder groups, and how people living with dementia and their carers are treated. Every three seconds, someone, somewhere, develops dementia. In 2019, some 55 million people were estimated to have dementia across the world, a figure predicted to increase to 139 million by 2050 according to the WHO.1 The annual cost of dementia was estimated to stand at US $1.3 trillion in 2019, a figure set to more than double by 2030 to $2.8 trillion. As the world population ages, dementia is becoming one of the leading causes of death in the world, making it all the more urgent for healthcare practitioners, policymakers, and the wider public to seize the significance of the condition and take action to mitigate its negative effects on individuals living with dementia, their families and carers, and societies as a whole. The concepts of dementia awareness and stigma are intricately related under the umbrella of attitudes to dementia. The report poses the question “what is stigma?” through an essay that seeks to define dementia-related stigma and to better understand its component parts based on power, stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. In 2019, Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI) commissioned a global survey on attitudes towards dementia conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), seeking to understand what were the prevailing beliefs, knowledge, and attitudes about the condition at that specific point in time. The 2019 survey garnered responses from some 68,000 participants, making it a landmark study on attitudes to dementia with unprecedented outreach – and the global baseline from which to measure future change. Five years later, ADI and LSE have conducted a follow-up survey in order to see whether attitudes to dementia have changed since. Like in 2019, LSE developed the survey to target four key groups, (1) people living with dementia, (2) carers, (3) health and care professionals and (4) the general public, with analysis being provided in three categories: knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour. The 2024 survey garnered more than 40,000 responses, which, while less than in 2019, still represents a significant number of respondents from around the world sharing their views on dementia, allowing us to see how perceptions of the condition have changed – or not – in the past five years. The analysis contained within these pages is non-exhaustive given the extensiveness of the survey, and more insights will undoubtedly be gleaned over time at the global and national levels. The time between 2019 and 2024 has seen major global upheavals: the COVID-19 pandemic that stretched healthcare systems beyond their capacity, large-scale and violent conflicts, and economic turmoil – all of which may have influenced social and political attitudes and discourse towards dementia. In times of hardship, marginalised and vulnerable populations are often the first to suffer the consequences, and this report explores some of the ways this has played out for people living with dementia. In addition to the survey, ADI commissioned essays to include in the report and provide complementary reflections and viewpoints on the rich topic of attitudes to dementia. The essays have been divided into three sections: expert essays, case studies of stigma, and case studies addressing stigma. The expert essays look at how attitudes to dementia influence, or are influenced by, broad issues such as gender, COVID-19, popular culture, or access to diagnosis and treatment. Case studies of stigma looked at how dementia stigma might express itself in specific instances, such as in some cultures or age groups, in the context of armed conflict, or the life experiences of people with dementia in their own words. Case studies addressing stigma look at some avenues through which attitudes to dementia have been improved throughout the world – whether by changing the terminology used to refer to dementia, providing support to LGBTQI+ people living with dementia, or outreach to children and young people. This section also includes testimonies from ADI member associations in lower- and middle-income countries about the significance of the 2024 survey for them, in areas often neglected by dementia research.