ABSTRACT

W hile changing money in a bank at W ildbad-K reut in Bavaria, Germany, in 1990 at a conference on “Proteolysis”, one of us (RJM) observed in a pension pamphlet that nearly 40% of the German population would be over the age of 60 by the year 2015. This figure is similar all over the Western world and also in Japan. Perhaps 15% of the population of these countries will be over 70, 10% over 80 and 5% over 90. In the U.K. in 1956, the new Queen of England sent congratulatory messages to less than one hundred centagenarians; in 1997 there were more than a thousand recip ients. The incidence of cognitive decline in the elderly will, without yet to be developed treatments or cures, parallel the dem ographic predictions: by 2015 Germany, with a current population of over 80 m illion, w ill have approximately 8-9 million people with dementing illnesses. Similar proportions of the population will be demented in other westernized societies. The economic, social and political consequences of such large numbers of cognitively impaired people is now being realized worldwide.