Fig. 1.

Multi-state model of the stages of healthy, dementia, care and dead. The boxes represent five states: (1) Healthy refers to no dementia, no care need. (2) Dementia includes incident and prevalent dementia, but without care need. (3) Care includes incident and prevalent care need, but without dementia (4) Dementia & Care refers to both dementia and care need. (5) Dead refers to a dead state, the only absorbing stage in our model. The other four states are transient states. The arrows represent the eight transitions from the ORIGIN STATE to the DESTINATION STATE