Abstract
Objective: To estimate the prevalence of dementia among American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) Medicare beneficiaries and compare the prevalence of dementia in AIANs and other racial and ethnic minority groups—non-Hispanic Blacks (NHBs) and Hispanics—with non-Hispanic Whites (NHWs) Medicare beneficiaries. Methods: We used survey data from Round 5 of the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS, 2015) (N = 7,449), a nationally representative study of Medicare beneficiaries ages 65 years and older. We used logistic regression to estimate the age- and sex-adjusted prevalence of dementia with 95% confidence intervals by race/ethnicity as well as prevalence differences between groups. Results: The majority of participants were between 65 and 74 years old. Approximately half of them were female. NHWs had a prevalence of 5% for dementia, and AIAIs had a prevalence of 9%, four percentage points higher than NHWs (95%CI 1%, 11%). We estimated a similar difference in the prevalence of dementia in AIAN Medicare beneficiaries compared to NHBs. Conclusion: While previous research has reported that AIANs share a similar or lower prevalence of dementia than NHWs, our findings suggest a potentially higher prevalence of dementia among AIAN Medicare beneficiaries. A relatively small number of AIAN resulted in wide confidence intervals for many of our associations. Future research should focus on recruiting a larger sample and on dementia prevalence and unique risk factors within and among AIAN tribes.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1527-1532 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities |
Volume | 10 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P30AG059295.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, W. Montague Cobb-NMA Health Institute.
Keywords
- American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN)
- Dementia
- Medicare beneficiaries
- National Health and Aging Trends Study
- Prevalence
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Comparative Study
- Journal Article
- Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural