Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to help increase the rate of diagnosis for people who develop symptoms of dementia before the age of 65.

As part of the spending review settlement in 2021/22, £17 million was allocated to the National Health Service to address dementia waiting lists, and to increase the number of diagnoses, which had been adversely impacted by the pandemic. NHS England will share learning on the impact of this funding and examples of good practice with dementia clinical networks, by the end of Summer 2024.

However, the dementia diagnosis rate is not calculated for patients aged under 65 years old. This is because the numbers of patients known to have dementia in the sample population age groups comprising the zero to 64 years old age range, is not large enough for reliable estimates to be made.

The Primary Care Dementia Data publication does include a monthly count of the number of patients aged 65 years old and under who do have a dementia diagnosis on their patient record, which is expressed as a raw count, and as a percentage of registered patients aged zero to 64 years old.