Neurodegenerative Diseases - Hospitalized Morbidity in Romania, 2015-2019

Abstract

Neurodegenerative diseases are found mainly among the elderly population, up to 2% of those over 65 being affected globally, most commonly by Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease, and specialist estimates indicate a doubling of the incidence every 20 years. 3.4% of the cases of dementia diagnosed in 2015 in Europe belong to Romania, 5.54% of all deaths due to this condition. From the point of view of hospitalized morbidity in the last 5 years, approximately 0.9% of all hospitalizations in Romania had as main diagnosis at hospitalization one of the neurodegenerative diseases, most commonly Alzheimer's disease or circumscribed brain atrophy, the trend of hospitalizations along years being an ascending one. Some characteristics of hospitalized morbidity in Romania would be: the fact that there are important discrepancies between different geographical areas in Romania, the differences being 10-20 times between the values observed between areas, the same being found in the case of values related to the population of each region in part; the differences between the sexes are not important, but in terms of age, over 90% of patients are people over 60; most episodes of hospitalization ended with an improvement in the patient's health, only a very small percentage resulting in the death of the person. A good knowledge of these characteristics allows the adoption of evidence based preventive and therapeutic measures that allow a better management of this chronic degenerative disease.