Dementia gender assocation

From a table of the combined top-10 of the male and female cause of death by percentage in England and Wales from the ONS 2010 annual mortality report, it can be seen that the women are much more likely to be registered with Dementia as their "final cause of death" @todo



I am interested to know how much of the high number of registered Dementia deaths for women is a result of the age-gender distribution of the population, and how much is from direct gender specific factors.


@todo - this post is currently just some charts from the data, but I'm putting this note here to come back and do some relative survival analysis, and generate the plots from an R script, and do some loglinear tests.

It's a fairly well known characteristic of human population age distributions that women tend to live longer than men, and hence have larger total numbers of women in the older age-segments. (@todo non-wikipedia ref)

It is also characteristic of Alzheimers and dementia that they are late onset diseases, so its interesting to try and see from this data whether dementia is is dependent on gender, or whether those results can be explained by the age-gender distribution alone.

Plotting the number of deaths per age-segment of the population results in a characteristic chart showing high numbers of older women registering with dementia as cause of death.

The age-distribution data is also available from the ONS Population estimates section.


The age-gender distribution of England and Wales from the ONS data for 2010 looks like this.

So there are clearly a lot more Women than men in the older age-segment categories.

Here is a close up of the population sizes in the interesting segments:

Below is a plot of crude number of deaths per age-segment divided by the estimated population size for that segment. I though this was going to be a probability, but presumably I have fucked up the scaling somewhere, because I don't think its possible to die more than once, so this must be Dementia deaths per 1000 people.

So for these older age segments it seems that a greater percentage of women than men died registered with dementia.









ONS Population estimates Quinary Age groups for UK Consituent countries

ONS Annual Mortality Report 2010


Stats exchange example of generating the population distribution chart..
http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2455/how-to-make-age-pyramid-like-plot-in-r