ממצאים מסקר שבוצע בקרב חברי קופת חולים שתצביע על מספר המבוטחים שקבלו אבחנה של דמנציה

Background: The National Program to Address Alzheimer`s Disease and other Dementias in Israel has been led by the Ministry of Health, Division of Geriatrics and its partners, since 2013. In order to plan services, national data were needed on people with dementia including prevalence, demographic and health characteristics and service use.

Methods: The Geriatric Division and the Israel Center for Disease Control collaborated with the four health funds to develop a national dementia survey using electronic medical record databases. Dementia case definition was based on a dementia diagnosis or the purchase of dementia medications. The population base was all people insured by the health funds aged 45 and over at the end of 2016.

Results: The prevalence of dementia was 6.6% for people 65 and over (1.5% in 65-74, 8% in 75-84, 25% in 85+). Using Western Europe population as the standard the prevalence of dementia over age 60 was lower in Israel at 4.9%. compared to Western Europe (6.8%) and the USA (5.7%) Of identified dementia cases, 36% were identified by diagnosis only, 19% by purchasing dementia medications, and 45% by both criteria, and 64% overall received dementia medications. Of identified dementia diagnoses, 57.2% were Alzheimer`s, 7.5% were vascular, 20.8% were non-specific and 14.6% were other. People with a lower socioeconomic status were underrepresented in the survey compared to the national average (8.3% vs 16%) and were less likely to purchase dementia medications.

Conclusion: This survey demonstrated a lower standardized prevalence of dementia than many other Western countries. Possible reasons might be under-diagnosis, lack of public and professional awareness, and diagnoses being made in the private rather than public system without information transfer. Future plans are to explore health services use by cross referencing encrypted personal identifiers with other national databases. This will provide the basis for a national dementia database that will shape future policy for dementia.