Jonathan Rosenthal

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92 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Jonathan Rosenthal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Economist Podcasts · Working memory: the surprising decline of dementia · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

There has just been this absolutely astonishing decline in the rates of dementia over the past 40 years.

Jonathan Rosenthal is an international correspondent at The Economist.

So just to give you an example, between 1988 and 2015, the share of older people with dementia fell by 13% a decade across six countries in North America and Europe.

But perhaps even more staggering, in the 1980s, three in every 10 people in their

late 80s had dementia and that rate has now gone down to roughly one in ten but it also seems as if a lot of the declines seem to be happening in rich countries and actually part of the burden of dementia will be shifting to much poorer countries this is sort of surprising there had been a sort of general narrative that the dementia problem was getting bigger not smaller

Yes.

So Jason, many people think it's going up.

And part of the reason is just that the single biggest risk factor for dementia is age.

That's as you get into your late 60s or 70s, the risks of getting dementia pretty much double every five years or so.

The fact is, we thankfully are living longer.

And then you've got this huge baby boom generation coming through.

So we've got a lot more old people in the pipeline.

And just on that kind of

mechanical maths, people have been projecting these really astronomical increases.

So much so that when I started talking to researchers who'd really dived in and actually looked at the rate per cohort, the age adjusted rate, some of them just couldn't believe the numbers themselves.

One of them, a lovely fellow, Eric Stallard from Duke University, held off publishing for two and a half years while he just kept on going back over that data to check that he hadn't made any mistakes.

Oh, that really is the million-dollar question.

And researchers are still really puzzling over what the exact kind of mechanisms are, what's going on in the brain chemistry that is causing a lot of these dementias.

So we've had this amyloid hypothesis that it's caused by these kind of tangles of proteins in the brain.

But actually, researchers are not sure whether that is the cause or a symptom of dementia.

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