The Prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease, Glaucoma and Age-related Macular Degeneration

The purpose of this report is to consolidate information on the individual and joint prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and glaucoma. In this report, the most current and robust sources for prevalence of each condition are identified and the joint prevalence of each combination of disease is calculated. While correlation of risk is likely to exist among these diseases, currently available evidence does not support the estimation of any such correlation. Thus, the prevalence results in this report are based on an assumption of independence of risk for each disease. This produces a conservative estimation of the prevalent population suffering from more than one disease. This report can serve as a guide to illustrate the probable prevalence of each of the three diseases and combinations of each in the US population by age. We calculated the prevalent population with each disease based on reported prevalence rates by age, and population by age identified in the 2010 US census. The following results are based on the latest evidence in the literature on the prevalence of each disease, as measured through gold-standard diagnosis criteria in community settings. Thus, these represent the true prevalence rate, including undiagnosed cases.