Incident dementia across neighbourhood material deprivation: Implications for underdiagnosis

Evidence consistently demonstrates that lower socioeconomic status (SES) confers greater dementia risk and that it is associated with poorer outcomes including reduced access to care. Furthermore, underdiagnosis is a widespread issue in dementia. However, few studies investigate whether one of the poorer outcomes associated with lower SES is a greater degree of dementia underdiagnosis.

We conducted a province-wide repeated yearly cross-sectional study (2000-17) of community-dwelling people with incident dementia in Quebec. Data were sourced from health administrative data held at the Quebec National Institute of Public Health and SES was assessed through a material deprivation index (a composite measure of the SES of census-based neighbourhoods). Given our near population-level sample, we used a descriptive approach: we described the proportion of incident dementia cases in each of 5 SES categories, from least to most material deprivation.

Of the 193,834 community-dwelling people with a new diagnosis of dementia between 2000-17, around 20 % belonged to each material deprivation category on average. Incident cases in the two least deprived categories comprised 18 % each of total incident cases, and 22 % each in the two most deprived categories.

Despite global findings of higher dementia incidence in lower SES, we found similar incidence across levels of material deprivation. Considering that recent work indicates that lower SES in Quebec is associated with poorer health outcomes consistent with literature, our discrepant finding of comparable incidence cases in the least and most deprived neighbourhoods indicates that there is likely severe underdiagnosis of dementia in people living in more materially deprived neighbourhoods in Quebec.