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. 2023 Jan 27:12:102.
doi: 10.12688/f1000research.129434.1. eCollection 2023.

Age-specific incidence of need for long-term care for men and women in Germany 2015: Cross-sectional study comprising 82 million people

Luisa Haß  1 , Sabrina Tulka  1 , Thaddäus Tönnies  2 , Annika Hoyer  3 , Rebecca Palm  4 , Stephanie Knippschild  1 , Ralph Brinks  1
Affiliations

Age-specific incidence of need for long-term care for men and women in Germany 2015: Cross-sectional study comprising 82 million people

Luisa Haß et al. F1000Res. .

Abstract

Background: With the growing number of older people, the number of people in need of long-term care is increasing, too. Official statistics only report on the age-specific prevalence of long-term care. Therefore, there is no data on the age- and sex-specific incidence of the need for care at the population level for Germany available. Methods: Analytical relationships between age-specific prevalence, incidence rate, remission rate, all-cause mortality, and mortality rate ratio are used to estimate the age-specific incidence of long-term care among men and women in 2015. The data is based on the official prevalence data from the nursing care statistics for the years 2011 to 2019 and official mortality rates from the Federal Statistical Office. For Germany, there is no data on the mortality rate ratio of people with and without a need for care, which is why we use two extreme scenarios that were obtained in a systematic literature search to estimate the incidence. Results: The age-specific incidence is about 1 per 1000 person-years (PY) in men and women at the age of 50 and increases exponentially up to the age of 90. Up to about the age of 60, men have a higher incidence rate than women. Thereafter, women have a higher incidence. At the age of 90, women and men have an incidence rate of 145 to 200 and 94 to 153 per 1000 PY, respectively, depending on the scenario. Conclusion: We estimated the age-specific incidence of the need for long-term care for women and men in Germany for the first time. We observed a strong increase, leading to a huge number of people in need of long-term care in higher age groups. It is to be expected that this will result in an increased economic burden and a further increased need for nursing and medical staff.

Keywords: ageing; epidemiology; long-term care.

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Conflict of interest statement

No competing interests were disclosed.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Line chart for the prevalence (in %) of the need for long-term care from 2011 to 2019; stratified by sex.
Representation of the age groups from <15, 15-59, from 60 in 5-year intervals up to 90+ (Data basis: care statistics from the Federal Statistical Office for the years 2011-2019).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. Logarithmic age-specific incidence rates per 1000 person-years in two scenarios depending on age, sex and mortality rate ratios ( R) for the year 2015.
Scenario 1: R = 3.2; Scenario 2: R = 1.17.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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