China's Alzheimer's time bomb revealed
New Scientist

18:42 07 June 2013 by Debora MacKenzie
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23673-chinas-alzheimers-time-bomb-revealed.html?cmpid=ILC|NSNS|2013-GLOBAL-teaserbar&utm_medium=ILC&utm_source=NSNS&utm_campaign=teaserbar

From what I can gather, language barrier and sketchy data with undetermined definitions have kept real figures of people with dementia related symptoms away from the rest of the world.

Just over 9 million Chinese people are living with dementia, (of whom 5.69 million had Alzheimer’s) which is more than any other country in the world.

"In 2010, China had more people living with Alzheimer's disease than any other country in the world – and twice as many cases of Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementia as the World Health Organization thought.

Cases of all kinds of age-related dementia in the country rose from 3.7 million in 1990 to 9.2 million in 2010. This is the finding of the first comprehensive analysis of Chinese epidemiological research, made possible by the recent digitisation of Chinese-language research papers. Previous estimates, based on English-language papers, seem to have under-reported the number of cases by half."

http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/news_article.php?newsID=1625

Image from: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1255356/more-9m-people-china-have-dementia-study-finds

“Adequate resources should be provided at the national, local, family and individual levels to tackle this growing problem,” said researcher Wei Wang of Edith Cowan Medical University in Perth, Australia, and Capital, Medical University in Beijing.

“Public awareness campaigns are needed to counteract common misconceptions about dementia - including that it is not very common in the Chinese population, that it is a normal part of ageing, or that it is better not to know about it because nothing can be done about it.”