A new study, published in the European Journal of Health Economics, has revealed that people who start anti-dementia medication within 3 months of receiving an Alzheimer’s disease (AD) diagnosis have lower cumulative costs over two years than peers who start taking medication later.
AD and related dementias are known to incur substantial direct and indirect costs, estimated at between EUR33,339 and EUR38,197 for an 18 month period in countries such as France, Germany and the UK. Recent studies have shown that starting anti-dementia medications (such as donepezil and galantamine) may help reduce costs by delaying disease progression and institutionalisation. In their new analysis, a team of researchers led by Prof. Miika Linna (University of Eastern Finland) studied a community-based cohort of 7454 Finnish people who had their first diagnosis of AD in 2012, assessing whether the timing of medication start impacts on the cumulative costs of AD over a two-year period.
Analysing individual-level data from Finnish national registries on health, social care and other parameters, Prof. Linna and colleagues identified 316,470 individuals aged over 74 in 2011-2014. Of these, 7,454 received an AD diagnosis when they were still living at home. People who purchased anti-dementia medications within 3 months of diagnosis were classified as “early starters”, and comparison of the social and health care costs for “early” and “late” starters revealed a 26.5% reduction in cumulative costs over two years for individuals who started anti-dementia medications sooner. This equates to an average cost of EUR30,787 for early starters, compared to EUR40,484 for late starters. The researchers also found that the trend for higher costs in late medication starters also continued after admission to long-term care. Read the full article, here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10198-022-01553-8
