Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia in the News, 2019–2026: Attention, Geography and Tone of Global Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

We measure how Alzheimer's disease and dementia were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 103,683 de-duplicated articles, and set that coverage beside 152,769 research papers and 7,396 patent families on the topic. Six results stand out: Steady attention. The topic took 6.92 articles per 10,000 news articles in 2019 and 6.94 in 2025. The high was 2023, at 8.29 per 10,000, and the peak month was July 2023, at 11.14. Geography. The United States holds 61.17% of located articles, 1.26 times its share of all news. The United Kingdom (2.4) and Sweden (6.43) are more over-represented still, while India (0.15) and China (0.57) are under-represented. Asia (0.28) and Africa (0.22) take far less than their weight in the news. States and shifts. Within the United States, Massachusetts (2.87) and Missouri (2.85) lead by lift once two states whose tags are geocoding errors are set aside. From 2023 to 2025 the topic's share of national news rose most in South Africa (3.08 times), Brazil (1.94) and New Zealand (1.86), and fell most in Ireland (0.35), Japan (0.54) and China (0.56). Tone and urgency. 31.5% of articles are negative in tone, against 33.6% of all news, and 66.8% are positive. Yet 76.7% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Measurement. 37.9% of raw matches for Alzheimer's and dementia vocabulary were structured research abstracts or market-research notices. Counting them would roughly add 61% to the count. Research and invention. Papers on the topic grew from 14.55 to 29.54 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025 (2.03 times). Patent families rose from 565 to 941 between 2015 and 2024, but only at the pace of all patenting (1.71 and 1.69 per 10,000 families). China's office holds 37% of filings.