A new medical study has confirmed what many have long suspected — people who rave as teenagers are more likely to develop early onset dementia later in life. “Now that the first generation of ravers is over fifty, we’re starting to get a decent grip on the health cost of raving,” says lead researcher Dr. Jerome Pentout. “The numbers don’t lie, for every twenty raves you attend as a teenager, your likelihood of suffering from dementia in your fifties doubles. That’s just an average, the actual numbers vary depending on what kind of parties people have attended. Some music scenes are associated with worse health outcomes than others. Attending twenty psytrance parties, for example, triples your likelihood of dementia.”

It’s not the 1980s anymore, so your typical raver is middle aged. Medical professionals are increasingly forced to deal with rave related health issues. It’s gotten to the point that some Universities are now teaching classes on raver gerontology. “We need to understand the impact that massive drug use and repetitive techno music have on the human body,” says Professor Charles Waiver, who teachers raver biology at Boston University. “How does raving change the body? That’s a question we’re only starting to figure out, and unfortunately, early research is very alarming.”

Dr. Pentout believes that future studies will only corroborate what his research says about the serious health dangers posed by raving. “The fact is, kids who rave today are going to place unnecessary burdens on our healthcare system forty years from now,” says Dr. Pentout. “I think the government has a moral and financial obligation to place strict limits on raving given how deleterious techno parties are to society. At the very least, people who insist on raving shouldn’t have their healthcare subsidized by the rest of us. They’re the one’s who’ve decided to turn their brains into Swiss cheese. If they want to destroy their minds, that’s their choice, but we shouldn’t be forced to pay for their poor decisions.”