A significant proportion of dementia deaths in England and Wales may be due to socio-economic deprivation, new research has revealed.
Such circumstances are also associated with deaths at a younger age due to dementia, as well as poorer access to accurate diagnosis also being uncovered.
The research, led by Queen Mary University of London, examined Office for National Statistics mortality data for England and Wales, and found that in 2017, 14,837 excess dementia deaths were attributable to deprivation, equating to 21.5 per cent of all dementia deaths that year.
The team also found that the effect of this association appears to be increasing over time.
Dementia continues to be the leading cause of death in England and Wales, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is the only disease in the top ten causes of death without effective treatment.
“Understanding how we might prevent dementia deaths is especially important,” says Dr Charles Marshall, corresponding author from Queen Mary’s Wolfson Institute, whose work is funded by Barts Charity.
“Persistent and widening socioeconomic inequality might be having an unrecognised impact on brain health.
“Addressing this inequality could be an important strategy to help stem the rising tide of dementia.”
Various factors have been hypothesised to mediate the relationship between dementia and socioeconomic deprivation, including education, diet, vascular risk factors, stress and access to healthcare.
It is likely that poorer quality of diagnosis in more deprived patients means that they are being disadvantaged in terms of prognosis, counselling, planning of future care, access to appropriate symptomatic treatments and opportunities to participate in research.
The research team in the study – which was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease – say that although a direct causal relationship between socioeconomic status and dementia has yet to be established, deprivation could be a major target in public health approaches aimed at reducing the population burden of dementia.
The study has limitations in that it is an observational study, meaning that a causal link between deprivation and dementia cannot be confirmed, and there is a lack of detail on specific dementia subtypes within the ONS data which is likely to lead to incomplete ascertainment of dementia cases.
