Over 1 Crore Senior Citizens In India Have Dementia: Study

New Delhi: More than 1 crore people in India aged 60 and above may be suffering from dementia.

A first-of-its-kind study, published in the journal Neuroepidemiology, used an artificial intelligence (AI) technique known as semi-supervised machine learning.

An international team of researchers – including from AIIMS New Delhi — analysed data from 31,477 older adults and found that the prevalence rate of dementia in senior citizens in India could be 8.44% — equating to 10.08 million.

Prevalence rates in similar age-groups in other countries were found to be similar — 8.8% in the US, 9% in the UK and 8.5% to 9% in Germany and France.

Prevalence of dementia was greater for those who were older, were females, received no education, and lived in rural areas, the researchers concluded.

“Our research was based on the first and only nationally representative aging study in India with more than 30,000 participating older adults in the country,” said Haomiao Jin, co-author of the study and Lecturer in Health Data Sciences at UK’s University of Surrey.

“AI has a unique strength in interpreting large and complex data like this, and our research found that the prevalence of dementia may be higher than prior estimates from local samples,” Jin stated.

The research team — from University of Surrey, University of Southern California, University of Michigan and AIIMS Delhi — developed an AI learning model which was trained on data consisting of 70% labelled dataset with dementia diagnoses from an online consensus.

The remaining 30% of the data was used as a test set to assess the AI’s predictive accuracy.

“As we are seeing with this research, AI has a huge potential to discover patterns in complex data, improving our understanding of how diseases impact people across very different communities to support the development of precision medical interventions to save lives,” said Prof. Adrian Hilton, Director of University of Surrey’s Institute for People-Centered AI.