NEW DELHI: More than 10 million adults aged 60 or above in India may have dementia, which is comparable to the prevalence rates for countries such as the US and the UK, as per a first-of-its-kind study.
The international team of researchers found that the prevalence rate of dementia in adults aged 60 or over in India could be 8.44 per cent — equating to 10.08 million older adults in the country.
The prevalence of dementia was greater for those who were older, were females, received no education, and lived in rural areas, the researchers found.
Published in the journal Neuroepidemiology, the study used an artificial intelligence (AI) technique known as semi-supervised machine learning to analyse data from 31,477 older adults. This compares to prevalence rates recorded in similar age groups of 8.8 per cent, it said.
"Our research was based on the first and only nationally representative ageing 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 the University of Surrey, UK.
"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 said.
The research team from the University of Surrey, University of Southern California and University of Michigan, both in the US and All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, developed an AI learning model.
The model was trained on data, which consisted of a 70 per cent labelled dataset with dementia diagnoses from a novel online consensus. The remaining 30 per cent of the data was reserved as a test set to assess the AI's predictive accuracy. The AI taught itself to predict dementia status for unlabelled observations without dementia diagnoses in the dataset.
"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," Professor Adrian Hilton, Director of the University of Surrey's Institute for People-Centered AI, added.
Dementia is used to describe a group of symptoms affecting memory, thinking and social abilities severely enough to interfere with the individual’s daily life. Alzheimer’s disease, which is a progressive neurologic disorder that causes the brain to shrink and brain cells to die, is the most common type of dementia. The other causes of dementia include ageing, hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol among others.
As per the Global Burden of Disease study, published in the Lancet Public Health last year, globally, the cases of dementia are expected to surge by 166 per cent from 57 million in 2019 to 153 million in 2050.