David Rein
September 2026
The Dementia DataHub’s 2022 data are live on the website, with national, state, and county estimates to browse and map. The 2022 public use file, with its codebook, is available for download, and the 2022 Research Report, The Scope of Diagnosed Dementia in the United States, is posted.
Read the 2022 Research Report
Beneficiaries ages 65 and older diagnosed with dementia experienced 1,300 emergency department visits per 1,000 beneficiaries in 2022, about two and a half times the rate of hospital discharges (510 per 1,000).
Annual data releases show trends and disparities but are limited when looking at areas and groups with lower populations, including rural counties or racial minorities. To facilitate more accurate measurement in these populations we have also released a pooled 2020-2022 data file which adds counts across the three years. This results in larger sample sizes, more stable rates, and lower suppression rates. Users must bear in mind that these counts represent three-year sums, not averages.
Beginning in 2022, DDH is applying a new data privacy and protection approach that uses primary suppression of cells less than 11 and rounding of other counts to both improve data privacy protection and reduce the number of cells that are suppressed. DDH’s 2020 and 2021 data suppressed all counts less than 11, and also applied a secondary suppression algorithm that suppressed complementary cells that could be used to reveal the value of the suppressed cells, and other cells were reported without rounding.
In the new approach, cells less than 11 are suppressed, all other values are rounded, and then we use an algorithm to calculate marginal values of each vector of cells to determine which, if any, can be reidentified and only then do we apply secondary suppression. The end result is data with much lower rates of suppression, but users must bear in mind that unlike earlier years of data, the 2022 file and 2020-2022 pooled file counts are reported as rounded numbers.
Among beneficiaries ages 65 and older diagnosed with dementia, 22.7 percent had a diagnosed COVID-19 infection in 2022, up from 13.6 percent in 2021. The increase coincides with the record infection waves of the Omicron variant, which began in late 2021 and continued into 2022.
The annual mortality rate among beneficiaries ages 65 and older diagnosed with dementia fell from 16.1 percent in 2021 to 15.6 percent in 2022. Mortality also declined within each case-definition category: from 20.9 to 20.4 percent among beneficiaries categorized as Highly Likely, from 13.5 to 13.1 percent among those categorized as Likely, and from 9.2 to 9.0 percent among those categorized as Possible. About two-thirds of the overall decline reflects these within-category reductions in mortality; the remainder reflects a shift in the distribution of beneficiaries toward the Possible category, which has a substantially lower mortality rate than the Highly Likely category.
Among beneficiaries ages 65 and older meeting any Dementia DataHub case definition, the share categorized as Possible increased from 31.9 percent in 2021 to 33.9 percent in 2022, while the shares categorized as Highly Likely and Likely each declined slightly. Overall prevalence of any dementia rose slightly, from 14.18 percent to 14.34 percent.
The incidence of dementia diagnosis was unchanged at 5.6 percent, 31.0 percent of diagnosed beneficiaries were hospitalized (compared to 30.6 percent in 2021), and short-stay and long-stay nursing facility use changed little. Average all-cause Medicare payments among FFS beneficiaries diagnosed with dementia rose 4.5 percent to $27,440.
Among Medicare beneficiaries 65 and older in 2022, 9.5 percent (5.3 million people) had a Highly Likely or Likely dementia diagnosis, and about a third of those cases (3.1 percent or 1.7 million beneficiaries nationally), had a new incident diagnosis during the year. Counting the Possible tier, 8.6 million Medicare beneficiaries had a dementia diagnosis, including 8.0 million (14.3 percent) among beneficiaries aged 65 and older.
Among those with a Highly Likely or Likely diagnosis, 19 percent died in 2022, and 31.7 percent were hospitalized at least once. Average Medicare payments per person among fee-for-service beneficiaries were $28,307 (all-cause payments are not measured in the Medicare Advantage population). Among all those with Possible, Likely, and Highly Likely Dementia, mortality fell from 16.1 percent in 2021 to 15.6 percent, and among fee-for-service beneficiaries, all-cause payments increased by 4.5 percent.
Among the 50 U.S. states, D.C., and Puerto Rico, the highest rates of diagnosed Highly Likely + Likely dementia were in Puerto Rico (17.3 percent), Florida (11.4 percent), Texas (10.9 percent), Alabama (10.6 percent), and New York (10.6 percent). The states with lowest rates were Wyoming (6.2 percent), Alaska, South Dakota, Vermont, and Montana (all at 6.5 percent).
Everything we post comes from our system’s Public Use File, which can be accessed freely via our data request form. If you notice a finding or pattern you think is important, we would love to hear about it. Find us at Dementiadatahub@norc.org.
The Dementia DataHub is funded by the National Institute on Aging and led by NORC at the University of Chicago with partners at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health and KPMG LLP.
