The Incidence of Vascular Dementia in Canada: A Comparison with Europe and East Asia

Abstract

Vascular dementia (VaD) is the second commonest subtype of dementia after Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, its incidence has been studied much less extensively than that of AD. This article reviews the incidence data for VaD reported in the international literature. Results from 10 incidence studies are compared to those of the Canadian Study of Health and Aging using age-standardized incidence ratios (SIR). SIRs vary from 0.42 to 2.68, indicating that geographical variation is still present after taking into account the countries' differential age distributions. It is still unclear if these differences are due to genetic and/or environmental factors since a large part reflects methodological differences between studies.