In a recent article by Melissa Healy of the Los Angeles Times (and syndicated to other newspapers like the Minneapolis Star Tribune), she lays out a horror story about Alzheimer’s. She writes:
Over the next 35 years, about 28 million baby boomers will likely develop Alzheimer’s disease, and the annual bill for their care will balloon from $11.9 billion in 2020 to more than $328 billion in 2040, says an analysis released last week.
Those numbers do not pass the smell test — at all. I’ll show you why in a moment. Clearly one of two things happened. Either reporter Healy paraphrased what the analysis really said, and distorted the accuracy of the data in the process (possibly by attributing all Alzheimer’s cases to baby boomers, and not to the entire population). Or Healy didn’t do adequate fact checking, and the analysis itself is completely bogus.
Why? Let’s look into the numbers a bit.
Baby boomers are those Americans born between 1946 and 1964. According to the Census Bureau, there were a total of 76 million births during those years. (Strangely, when I add up the births per year for each of those years, I get about 74 million when rounding to the nearest ten-thousand.)
A first “smell test” or “do the numbers even make sense” question would be to ask, could there really be 28 million out of 76 million people getting Alzheimer’s disease? That’s an astonishing 36.8%, more than one in three, people will develop Alzheimer’s over the next 35 years! It’s an epidemic! Or is it?
The same organization that provided the numbers used by journalist Healy also says this (PDF):
- 11 percent of people age 65 and older have Alzheimer’s.
- 32 percent of people age 85 and older have Alzheimer’s.
Even if you believe those above numbers, there’s no way to get to 36.8% of 76 million baby boomers. First, 11 million of those 76 million boomers had already died by the year 2012.
Inconveniently, we also had just over 11 million immigrants of the same age, so we were at about 76 million (76.4 to be more exact) baby boomer aged people living in the USA — in 2012. Do all immigrant baby boomers get Alzheimer’s? Something is needed to pull the average up.
The average lifespan for baby boomers ranges from 62.9 years to 69.7. Over those coming 35 years when this Alzheimer’s epidemic among baby boomers is supposed to occur, what age will boomers be?
In 2015, the oldest were 2015 minus 1946 equals 69. Already the oldest were at the average age of death. The youngest were 2015 minus 1964 equals 51. Most of the youngest can be presumed to be still alive. Since it’s an average age of death, not a median, we cannot literally say half of the oldest are already dead, but certainly a significant number are.
In 35 years, in 2050, when we will allegedly have had 28 million baby boomers develop Alzheimer’s, the oldest boomers will be 2050 minus 1946 equals 104. Oh hey, I’m sure there will be lots of those! And the youngest boomers will be only 2050 minus 1964 equals 86 — for a group of people who on average die at age 66.9 for men and 73.7 for women.
So how many baby boomers will even be alive in 2050? Some estimates put that number at about 18 million. There’s only about 75 million alive today in 2015. By 2028, the number is estimated to fall to 65 million.
Clearly there cannot be 28 million baby boomers with Alzheimer’s in 35 years (2050), since there will be far less than that number even alive.
The only ways to get to 28 million baby boomers with Alzheimer’s disease over the next 35 years is to assume nearly all of the boomers alive today in 2015 will live to be 85 years of age, far exceeding all the actuarial table estimates. Or that Alzheimer’s will actually cause the death of more than a third of those alive.
All the numbers say that heart disease, lung cancer, lung disease, diabetes and strokes lead that hit parade, though. For adults over 65, Alzheimer’s comes in number 10 behind 9 other deadly causes.
Clearly that 28 million baby boomers with Alzheimer’s number is bogus.
How did it get that way? Maybe it was meant to be 28 million newly diagnosed cases of Alzheimer’s over the next 35 years in US residents of all ages, not just boomers? Or even adult residents, since over 35 years, a lot of Generation X will become senior citizens, and even Millennials will be hitting late middle age. Or maybe the Alzheimer’s Association’s math is a bit fuzzy, and in calculating that number, they mixed apples and oranges because it looked so impressive. Likely it’s to the Association’s advantage to have bigger numbers.
Regardless, even without doing all the math above, 28 million out of 76 million adults alive today are not all going to develop Alzheimer’s. It’s that simple. It fails the smell test.
