Prevalence and costs
Up-to-date estimates of the current and future prevalence of dementia and of the costs of dementia are needed for policymaking and planning and these are available for both NI and ROI. Estimates of the numbers of people with dementia are made by applying dementia prevalence rates (the proportion of people affected) to the numbers of people in a given population. Dementia prevalence rates are obtained from population-based epidemiological surveys. Meta-analysed figures were applied in both jurisdictions and the reports summarised below explain the methodology used. The Dementia UK Update (2014) also includes updated costs of dementia in the UK, but could not estimate costs separately for the different regions of the UK since the requisite disaggregated data were not available for each country.