While all eyes have been on Covid these past 17 months, a more familiar, far slower killer has remained in our midst. Dementia caused more female deaths last year than coronavirus, new figures show. Yet, somewhat inevitably, the 45,922 women it killed in 12 months have been much further from the spotlight than Covid has.
Dementia and Alzheimer’s don’t only kill women, of course. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show the diseases also claimed the lives of more than 24,000 men during the same period. One in three of us is expected to develop it in our lifetime and 850,000 people in the UK are currently living with some kind of dementia. But the prevalence is undeniably higher among women, who account for approximately two-thirds of those who develop dementia.
The question is why might this be? As is so often the case, there are multiple factors at play. More research is needed to gain a complete picture, but we do have some answers already.
Women’s brains appear to age slower than men’s. A woman’s brain is on average four years younger than the brain of a man the same age. So it may seem paradoxical that more women get dementia than men. But we know the single biggest risk factor for dementia is age. And quite simply, women live longer than men. By the time you reach 85, there are about 50 men for every 100 women.
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