Health Costs For Alzheimer’s Patients Higher Before Diagnosis

the Psychiatry Advisor take:

Health care costs for people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) increase a year before the diagnosis is even made.

Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland, using data from the Finnish Medication Use and Alzheimer's Disease Study, Medalz, involving over 70,000 AD patients found that most of the health care costs (78-84%) for these patients comes from hospital care.

The costs of drug therapy were analyzed as overall costs, and the costs of hospital days were calculated according to the Finnish health care system's unit costs, which also include the patient's payment contribution.

The difference in health care costs between AD and non-AD patients were highest six months after diagnosis, with AD patients having, on average $5436 higher costs per person, annually. And although the difference evened out after six months, two years after diagnosis, AD patients health care costs stabilized at twice that of non-AD patients, the researchers reported in the Journal of Public Health.

Five years before diagnosis, Alzheimer’s patients had, on average, 1.4 more hospitals days per year than non-AD patients. Two years after diagnosis, that figur jumped to 14.2 more hospital days.