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Bridging the Care Gap for People Living Alone With Dementia
Federal policies and programs recognize that people living with dementia often experience an increasing need for care and support, and much of this care and support comes from family members who typically live with the person living with dementia.
Bridging the Care Gap for People Living Alone With Dementia
Defining the Care Gap: The Hidden Struggles of People Living Alone With Dementia
Federal policies and programs recognize that people living with dementia often experience an increasing need for care and support, and much of this care and support comes from family members who typically live with the person living with dementia (CMS, 2023). But what about people living with dementia who live alone? There is a small but important proportion of older adults who are people living alone with dementia. Nationally representative data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS; University of Michigan, 2022a, 2022b) and the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS; Freedman et al., 2022) reveal that just shy of 1% of U.S. adults ages 65 and older are people living alone with dementia (Table 1). These prevalence rates suggest that there are around half a million people living alone with dementia in the United States (ACL, 2024). However, among Older Americans Act (OAA) service participants completing the National Survey of Older Americans Act Participants (NSOAAP; ACL, 2023), this percentage is much higher, ranging between 1% (congregate meal clients) and 6.4% (homemaker clients). Although a small proportion of older adults living in the United States, people living alone with dementia often utilize more resources and face higher care costs than people living with dementia who live with others (Bremer et al., 2017; GBD 2019 Dementia Forecasting Collaborators, 2022), making it imperative to further examine this group.
Public Policy & Aging Report, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/praf010