A Simple Method for Simulating Dementia Onset and Death within an Existing Demographic Model.

Adding simulation of dementia to a kinship network model enables prediction of the availability of family caregivers for people with dementia under a range of different assumptions about future fertility, mortality, and dementia risk. We demonstrated how to add simulation of dementia onset and death to an existing microsimulation model to obtain a method for predicting dementia prevalence in the context of another more detailed model. The approach we developed can be generalized to simulate other progressive health conditions that affect mortality.