Mental health: dementia

Dementia is a term used to refer to a variety of illnesses and conditions which result in a global impairment of brain function and a decline in intellectual functioning, personality changes, and behaviour problems which disrupt independent living skills and social relationships. There are a number of types of dementia including Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia, Lewy body disease, alcohol-related brain damage (ARBD), frontotemporal dementia, subcortical dementia, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

In 2017, the Scottish Government published their third national dementia strategy, which covers the years 2017-2020; the fourth national dementia strategy is currently in development. The third national dementia strategy included the commitment to extend and embed dementia post-diagnostic support. Local Delivery Plan (LDP) Standards were introduced to monitor the delivery of a minimum of one year of post-diagnostic support for all people newly diagnosed with dementia.

The Dementia post-diagnostic support publication by Public Health Scotland reports on this LDP standard. In Scotland, in 2019/20:

8,144 people were diagnosed and referred for dementia post-diagnostic support
Of those referred, 81.3% received a minimum of one year’s post-diagnostic support
Of all people estimated to be newly diagnosed with dementia, 42.9% were referred for post-diagnostic support.

In 2021, the first Scottish Brain Health and Dementia Research Strategy (5.7MB) was published, prepared by Alzheimer Scotland, The Scottish Dementia Research Consortium, and Brain Health Scotland. The strategy aims to ‘create an environment in Scotland to promote the conditions for the highest quality of brain health and dementia research and the rapid implementation of research into practice’.

There is further information on Dementia on the Public Health Scotland website. Estimates of the number and rate of Disability-Adjusted Life Years attributable to Alzheimer’s and other dementias are available on the Scottish Burden of Disease dashboard.

Please note: If you require the most up-to-date data available, please check the data sources directly as new data may have been published since these data pages were last updated. Although we endeavour to ensure that the data pages are kept up-to-date, there may be a time lag between new data being published and the relevant ScotPHO web pages being updated.