engleski

Predicting risk of high healthcare costs in Alzheimer patients – prospective cohort study

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative, progressive and incurable disease with a heterogeneous aetiology. Neurodegenerative diseases that lead to dementia in the health, social and economic indicators (costs of support and treatment of patients with AD in the Western world will soon be the same as common costs for cardiovascular disease, cancer and stroke together) have today a huge significance. The objective of this research is to design and internally validated multivariate predictive model on highest expenses for AD. Materials and methods: This research is unicentric, observational and applied (prospective cohort, prognostic study). It is conducted at the Health Center Zagreb Zapad. Target population are patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease who live in private households at the time of inclusion in the study. Estimated sample siže is 205 patients (by two-stage, stratified random sampling). The main outcome is the upper quartile of the total cost of treatment for formal and informal care. It will be measured by calculating the cost of formal medical and social care and treatment at average prices and with Resource Utilization in Dementia (RUD) questionnaire. Results: The research is in the very early stage and small number of data is collected so far. There aren't any preliminary results available. Discussion: This model can be used in early recognition of patients at higher risk of high costs of future health care and thus more quality and financially accountable organization of health care and more proper allocation of resources.

Alzheimer's disease; cost; predictive model

nije evidentirano