Dementia-friendly urban design could stop thousands with dementia going missing

Around 40,000 people with dementia go missing every year in the UK and new research suggests they are more likely to be reported missing in areas where road structures are 'complicated' and 'disordered'.

The researchers from UEA’s Norwich Medical School found the more intersections there are, the more complex these intersections are, and the more disorganised the overall road network is, the bigger the problem for people with dementia.

By identifying these environmental risk factors, the findings from UEA’s Norwich Medical School can potentially help identify or predict areas where people with dementia may be at higher risk of going missing from and contribute to the development of safeguarding guidelines to prevent them from going missing in future. In the future dementia-friendly urban design could help reduce the number of people with dementia going missing.

Researchers studied 210 ‘missing person’ police reports for people with dementia going missing in Norfolk over a three year period and compared each case to the nearby road network to see whether the design of road networks could be linked to people going missing.

People with dementia often struggle with navigation

PhD student Vaisakh Puthusseryppady, UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said: “We were particularly interested in road layouts as they determine significantly our navigation, in particular the complexity of the road network, the complexity of road intersections and how ordered the overall layout of the road network is.

“We found the higher the density of road intersections, the more complicated the road intersections are, and the less ordered or less grid-like the overall road network layout, the greater the risk for people with dementia to get lost.

“We think this is because each road intersection represents a point at which a person needs to make a critical navigation decision.”

The Alzheimer’s Society reports there are over 850,000 people living with dementia in the UK today and estimate this figure will rise to over one million by 2025. The researchers from UEA’s Norwich Medical School hope their findings will help inform future safeguarding guidelines for those living with dementia.

'Around 70% of people with dementia may go missing at least once'

Professor Michael Hornberger, UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said: “When a person with dementia goes missing, it can have life-threatening consequences. But very little is known about what actually causes people with dementia to go missing.

“Unfortunately, the first event when people with dementia go missing comes completely out of the blue when doing such routine activities as going for a walk with the dog or getting the newspaper from the local shop.

“People with dementia getting lost or going missing is a problem worldwide. Around 70 per cent of people with dementia may go missing at least once, with some at risk of going missing multiple times.”

People with dementia often struggle with navigation and researchers wanted to know if there was a correlation between people going missing and the outdoor environment they went missing from.

“These factors can make it more likely for people with dementia to make an error and make a wrong turn, causing them to get lost and go missing,” says Professor Hornberger.

Mr Puthusseryppady added: "It will also inform future recommendations for dementia-friendly urban design.”

The study was led by UEA in collaboration with University College London, the University of Leeds, the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, and Norfolk Constabulary.

The research can be found in the journal Scientific Reports, ‘Impact of road network structure on dementia-related missing incidents: a spatial buffer approach' published 29 October.