I BLAME GLOBAL WARMING. AND GEORGE W. BUSH! As More People Live Longer Why Are Rates of Dementia Falling? “A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine points out that something unexpected has happened to confound the gloomy prognostications of epidemiologists and demographers. As the percentage of people surviving into old age increases, so the proportion of them who suffer from dementia decreases. People are not only living longer, but living better. This is a phenomenon that has happened across the western world.”