Modelling costs of dementia in Australia: evidence, gaps, and needs

With the rapid ageing of the Australian population, dementia has emerged as a major health and economic challenge. Consensus exists that the number of people with dementia will grow signifi-cantly beca e the prevalence is strongly corre-lated with age. However, there are substantial gaps in our understanding of the impacts on the dementia “ep demic ” of changes in non-demo-graphic risk factors and of our knowledge of the economic implications. Only a few prevalence-based studies have been conducted to examine the health economics of dementia in Australia. These studies have suggested that considerable resources are absorbed by dementia care, ye