Prognosis with dementia in Europe: A collaborative study of population-based cohorts

The effect of dementia on time to death and institutionalization in elderly populations is of importance to resource planning, as well as to patients and their carers, The authors report a collaborative reanalysis of nine population-based studies conducted in Europe to compare dementia cases and noncases in risk of and time to death and to institutionalization. Prevalent and incident cases were more likely than noncases to reside in an institution at baseline and were more likely to enter institutional care. Prevalent cases also had over twice the risk of death compared to noncases and survival for men with dementia was consistently lower than that for women with dementia of the same age group.