Dementia rates in Australia will increase four-fold as the population ages, affecting more than 1 million people by 2050, with “dire consequences” for the health system, a report warned yesterday.
The forecast, prepared for the Alzheimer’s Australia lobby group by consulting firm Access Economics, warned next year would signal the beginning of the trend, with the first of the “baby boomer” generation reaching retirement age.
Neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia would overtake heart disease and cancer as the most pressing issue for Australia’s health system, the report said, with both their prevalence and severity set to increase.
“The rising prevalence of dementia will have dire consequences for our health care system and our quality of life,” it said.
“The baby boomer bulge in Australia’s demographic profile means that the coming decade will see an acceleration of the impacts of ageing on dementia prevalence greater than previously seen in Australia’s history,” it said.
The number of people with dementia was predicted to rise to 1.13 million by 2050 from 245,400 this year.
Dementia was already the leading single cause of disability in Australians and by 2023 would cost the health system more than heart disease.
“By the 2060s, spending on dementia is set to outstrip that of any other health condition,” the report said.
“It will represent around 11 percent of the entire health and residential aged care sector spending,” it said.
Measures to lower high blood pressure, a known risk factor for the condition, could result in a drop in cases of dementia of at least 5.5 percent, the report said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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