15 October 2025
Dementia death rate to rise by 4.4% in 2024: Statistics Office
The number of people suffering from dementia as a registered cause of death in Germany is expected to increase by 4.4% to 61,927 in 2024. Destatis, the government’s statistics office, said,
This figure is 23.2% higher than the 10-year average for 2015-2024, indicating relatively rapid growth in the region.
More than half of these cases, 37,109, were women, with dementia now the leading cause of death in women in Germany, followed by coronary heart disease and heart failure. For men, the three leading causes were coronary heart disease, tumors of the lungs and bronchi, and myocardial infarction (heart attack).
The higher prevalence of dementia and Alzheimer’s in women is partly due to higher life expectancy, with about 90% of dementia deaths occurring in people aged 80 years or older, but it is also believed that there are other factors contributing that are as yet poorly understood.
If you group together heart and circulatory problems, such as various heart attacks and conditions and strokes, and various types of cancer, these are still the most common causes of death for both sexes.
A total of 339,212 people died last year from heart and circulatory problems and 230,392 from malignant tumors (the most common type of cancer), accounting for 56.5% of all deaths in the country.
Overall, the country’s total of 1.01 million deaths in 2024 was about 2% less than the previous year.