Data-driven Dementia Prevention

Dementia places an enormous burden on those living with it and their caregiving relatives. An estimated 1.8 million people were living with the condition in Germany in 2023 and this number could rise to 2.7 million within 25 years. Experts are already putting the overall societal costs of dementia at over 80 billion euro per year. Although there is as yet no causal treatment or cure for dementia, preventive measures have immense potential for alleviating the burden of the disease. Almost half of all dementia cases could be prevented by comprehensive prevention measures focusing on 14 well-researched risk factors.

The joint position paper from acatech – National Academy of Science and Engineering, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities sets out six approaches to exploiting the potential of dementia prevention. A data-driven approach to prevention is key: health data enable better individual risk assessment and research in greater depth into complex patterns of disease. In the long term, prevention measures for other widespread conditions such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer or diabetes could also benefit from this approach.