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(Reuters) From Google Health to Wii Fit, Americans have an increasingly wide array of tools for tracking their health backgrounds and statistics but their understanding of what that data means is poor, threatening their health and costing the economy billions of dollars.
Just 12 percent of American adults are health literate at a level that allows them to manage their care, the latest News and Numbers statement from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) showed.
The AHRQ release is based on information from the 2007 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report , which found that the majority of Americans lacked the skills required to correctly complete health care-related activities like reading a prescription bottle, figuring out medication dosage, filling out forms or calculating insurance coverage. That lack of literacy can negatively affect the quality of care a patient receives and costs the U.S. economy between $106 billion and $236 billion annually, the University of Connecticut said in a report last year. That’s enough to insure all of the more than 47 million Americans currently without coverage.
“There is a number of areas and ranges within the health care system where low health literacy really leads to vast inefficiencies and resource utilization,” said John Vernon, the report’s lead author.
A survey done in 2003 classified Americans into four health literacy categories: proficient, intermediate, basic and below basic. Twenty-two percent were classified as having basic health literacy while 14 percent were below basic. In other words, more than a third of the respondents likely couldn’t determine medication dosage from the instructions on a prescription bottle, said Cindy Brach , a health literacy expert with the AHRQ.
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Posted on: March 29, 2008
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An estimated 5.2 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, and it could steal the minds of one out of eight baby boomers, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Alzheimer’s Association.
The report found there were 411,000 new cases of Alzheimer’s in 2000, a number expected to grow to 454,000 new cases a year by 2010. By 2050, 959,000 people will be diagnosed with the disease every year, the report predicts.
The report, available on the Internet here, says that 14 percent of all people age 71 and over have dementia.
That includes 16 percent of women and 11 percent of men in that age group.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia, accounting for 60 to 80 percent of cases.
It starts out with mild memory loss and confusion but escalates into complete memory loss and an inability to care for oneself. There is no cure and the handful of drugs that can treat Alzheimer’s only slow its progression for a short time.
The second most common cause of dementia is vascular dementia, often caused by strokes.
The causes of Alzheimer’s disease are not yet clear. The brains of patients are clogged with protein plaques and tangles of nerve fibers. Corporate and academic scientists are working on tests for disease risk, better drugs to treat the symptoms and vaccines that might prevent the brain damage. Continued…
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