November 2025
Last Data Update: November 19, 2025
Last Site Functionality Update: November 19, 2025
Public Use Files (PUF) Available: 2020, 2021
For access, please email dementiadatahub@norc.org.
New Data: Updated 2021 Medicare data include all individuals alive and enrolled as of January 1, 2021, with dementia prevalence determined using diagnoses from 2019–2021 (see Case Definitions). Users can select the desired data year using the “Year” dropdown menu.
New Case Definition: Highly Likely + Likely Dementia combines all individuals meeting either of these two case definitions. This category is available for the 2020 and 2021 data. Users can select the desired case definition using the “Dementia Category” dropdown menu.
New Secondary Outcomes Among Prevalent Cases: Available for 2021 data only, we have added the following measures among individuals with prevalent dementia:
- Hospitalization Rate
- Hospital discharges per 1,000
- Short-stay nursing facility rate
- Long-stay nursing facility rate
Please see Outcome Measure Definitions for more information.
Increased Availability of Age 65+ Data, Reduced Availability of Age <65 Data: We have changed our system’s data suppression implementation strategy to increase the availability of data for the combined age category of all people ages 65 and older. The system uses data suppression of any cells with a count below 11, or any cell with a count below 11 that can be inferred from a combination of other cells. Because of this, data for all people ages 65+ must be suppressed whenever the cell size of the Age <65 group is suppressed. This led to a very large amount of data suppression for the age 65+ category. We adjusted our suppression strategy to enable us to show more data for the ages 65+ group, a primary outcome of interest. This has resulted in the following differences for 2021 data as compared to 2020:
- We show vastly more data estimates for the age 65+ group in 2021.
- We now only release prevalence data for people younger than age 65, and only when no data suppression is needed to protect privacy.
- We have removed the option to select all ages because data for the younger than 65 group is usually suppressed.
- We supply total numbers for all individuals in Medicare in our Research Report.
