Dealing with dementia

An employee at a nursing home in Zhongshan, Guangdong province, helps a patient with dementia eat in September 2013. Ye Zhiwen / for China Daily

Alzheimer's disease is threatening the world's largest elderly population.

When Xie Weiying noticed her father losing his memory and suffering from similar lapses in his judgment and language ability, she thought it was just a sign of his old age.

But the symptoms worsened. In 2008, Xie's father, then 77, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

"Until my father was diagnosed to have Alzheimer's, I never thought that his condition was a disease," said Xie, 55, from Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province. Her father died last year.

In early July, Beijing Normal University professor Li Xihui was riding a bike home before his wife reported that he was missing. The university offered a 50,000 yuan ($8,100) reward to anyone who could locate the professor. Three days after the police received the report about Li missing, a sanitation worker found him. The 57-year-old professor's plight drew widespread attention.

The two cases are just part of a major challenge facing the country as its population ages. Many Chinese have associated the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer's with the natural process of aging, but more are realizing that the disease can be managed even if there is no cure for it.

Statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed that the number of Chinese citizens aged 60 and above will reach 250 million in 2020. That means that 17 out of every 100 Chinese will be over 60 by then.

A research paper by MIT AgeLab, an organization under the US university that mainly translates technologies into practical solutions that improve people's health, showed that a quarter of Asia's population will be elderly people aged above 60 by the end of 2025. Similar conditions are expected to be faced in Europe, where the number of elderly will climb from 19.8 percent of the population in 2000 to 28.8 percent by 2025.

"An aging society can be followed by many problems and the most crucial one is that of chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's," said Fang Yiru, director of the Shanghai Mental Health Center.

"China's elderly population, which exceeds 100 million people, is the largest in the world," Fang said.

The current prevalence of Alzheimer's in China is about 5 percent in people aged over 65, Fang said. But the rate soars dramatically among people aged over 80, to 20 percent. The World Health Organization estimated that Alzheimer's patients in China will hit 11.7 million in 2020, which means that one out of every 10 Alzheimer's patients worldwide will be Chinese.