Project information
Health and Economic Outcomes of Early Dementia Diagnosis: Understanding the Role of Comorbidities

Introduction: Contemporary medicine cannot stop or reverse dementia, but early interventions mitigate and delay its impact on daily functioning. As these interventions also help people with dementia (PWD) to keep paying sufficient attention to their comorbidities and medication intake, they may reduce health problems that get primarily attributed to other diseases. Disregarding this hidden effect underestimates the true health and economic gain of intervening early.

Objective: To investigate the effect of dementia diagnosis timing on comorbidities, healthcare utilization, costs, and health-related quality of life.

Methods: Working with Czech Brain Aging Study, Amsterdam Dementia Cohort and Swedish Dementia Registry, we will link individual clinical data about PWD with administrative healthcare registers to gather longitudinal information on the disease stage at diagnosis, disease progression, and healthcare utilization. We will further collect data on quality of life, social and informal care to complement the existing data. We will estimate generalized linear mixed models to quantify the annual difference in healthcare utilization, costs and quality of life according to the diagnosis timing. A qualitative study consisting of semi-structured interviews with PWD-caregiver pairs will tap their personal experience. A microsimulation model will be developed to assesses how stratification of health and economic outcomes according to diagnosis timing impacts cost-effectiveness of timely dementia diagnosis, and to evaluate cost-effectiveness of national policies to prevent and treat dementia.

Relevance: The project identifies and quantifies a neglected, yet potentially preventable, impact of dementia on comorbidities that is detrimental to PWD and burdensome to the healthcare system. A combination of analysis based on quantitative data and a lived experience of PWD and their caregivers brings comprehensive insights for clinical practice and dementia policies.