The European Court of Auditors (ECA) have published a special report examining whether the Commission provides high-quality European statistics identifying a number of weaknesses that still need to be addressed. Relevant to dementia, the report found that ‘causes of death’ data is significantly different across countries, despite a number of guidelines on harmonisation. As such, for ‘causes of death’ data for dementia, Member States encode dementia in very different ways. Despite dementia being one of the most expensive diseases and the second leading cause of death in high-income countries, data is inconsistent. For example, Alzheimer's disease accounts globally for 60-70 % of all dementia cases, yet its share under the ‘dementia’ category in ‘causes of death’ varied in 2018 from 3.4 % in Malta to 99.9 % in Romania. The ECA makes several recommendations to improve the quality of European statistics. These include better meeting user needs, prioritising EU funding for innovative projects, improving the quality assessment of European statistics, and reconsidering the current practice of pre-releasing statistics. The full report is available at:
