Looming epidemic to hit insurance payouts

Pinpointing risk is getting much harder for insurers given a devastating phenomenon striking younger and younger clients

It used to be that early-onset dementia hit people in their 60s but a new study from Professor Colin Pritchard who lectures at Bournemouth University in the UK suggests people are being diagnosed in their 40s and death rates are soaring.

Pritchard’s study compared 21 Western countries between the years 1989 and 2010. The results were published in the Surgical Neurology International journal; last week those findings were then highlighted in a London Times article.

Those in the United States are particularly prone to death by neurological disease and especially in women over the age of 75 where occurrences have increased fivefold.

“The rate of increase in such a short time suggested a silent or even a hidden epidemic, in which environmental factors must play a major part, not just aging,” Pritchard said in the London Times. “The environmental changes in the last 20 years have seen increases in the human environment of petro-chemicals — air transport, quadrupling of motor vehicles, insecticides and rises in background electro-magnetic field, and so on.”

Although the study points to environmental factors as a part of the increase, it’s clear that no single factor is to blame. Thus, it could become more difficult for insurance carriers to assess the risks on life insurance and to a lesser extent, critical illness.

“We can’t conclude that modern life is causing these conditions at a younger age,” Dr. Simon Ridley, head of research at Alzheimer’s Reserach UK told the London Times. “We know that Alzheimer’s and other dementias can have a complex interplay of risk factors.”
 
 

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