MONDAY, June 20, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- Providing medical care for the nearly 28 million men and women who now suffer from Alzheimer's-related dementia costs an estimated $156 billion per year worldwide, a team of Swedish scientists reports.
The findings stem from the first study ever conducted to specifically assess the disease's overall financial impact on health care systems across the globe.
The researchers, who were to present their findings Monday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference on Prevention of Dementia, in Washington, D.C., emphasized that their tabulations were based solely on such direct medical care costs as hospitalization, drugs, clinic visits, diagnostics, nursing care and social services.
They stressed, therefore, that significant indirect costs -- such as the time and effort provided by a patient's spouse, friends and/or neighbors -- would only augment the already monumental direct-care costs involved in treating Alzheimer's-related dementia.
Dementia is characterized as a severely disabling disorder in which brain function progressively deteriorates over time, resulting in a significant loss of short and/or long-term memory, the inability to communicate or reason properly, and confusion.
The authors caution that their global Alzheimer's cost tally was based on 2003 data and included some source information that was, at times, difficult to verify and categorize. In that light, they provided a supplementary number crunch, which suggested that global cost figures might in fact range from a low of $129 billion to a high of $159 billion.
Any way you calculate it, they stressed, the financial drain posed by Alzheimer's is universally striking and substantial.
And this is nowhere more true, they said, than in the United States where about one-third of the global annual medical expense figure -- or $50 billion -- is spent on caring for what they calculate are approximately 3 million Alzheimer's patients.
"This is the most costly disease for our society," said study lead author Dr. Bengt Winblad, chief physician at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and the Karolinska University Hospital in Huddinge. "It's more costly than both cardiovascular disease and cancer put together."
Winblad and his colleagues utilized the United Nations population data base to calculate the prevalence of Alzheimer's in different regions of the world. In addition, prior studies exploring the cost of illness in certain sample countries were used as a base upon which to model the expenses entailed in providing direct medical care for dementia.
The researchers arrived at their final figures by further stacking such direct-care costs against every country's gross domestic product per capita -- a method that they said is routinely used in health care cost analyses. Using this approach, richer countries typically demonstrated the highest Alzheimer's-related health care costs.
In fact, the Swedish team found that the "advanced economies" as a whole represented 38 percent of the world's Alzheimer's patients, but they also accounted for 92 percent of Alzheimer's-related direct health care costs.
The United States and Canada, Winblad noted, currently spend about $16,000 in direct medical care per Alzheimer's patient each year. By contrast, $8,500 annually is spent on per-patient care in Europe, while roughly $400 is spent per patient across the African continent.
Against this stark financial snap-shot, Winblad suggested that spending more money on Alzheimer's research today will ultimately help to significantly curtail medical care costs down the road.
In that vein, he acknowledged the potential benefits that new legislation, like the Ronald Reagan Alzheimer's Breakthrough Act, may provide for ratcheting up American investment in Alzheimer's research.
The bill -- currently under consideration by Congress -- would double federal funding for Alzheimer's research to $1.4 billion per year, while providing family caregivers with a tax credit of up to $3,000 per year to help cover expenses related to medication, home health care and day care.
"The amount we now spend on research is very low compared to the societal costs," said Winblad. "And I think even a small step forward in increasing research has an enormous impact -- because it improves patient care and it improves the relationship between caregivers and patients. And more research may lead to better drugs, which will allow patients to stay home longer. And perhaps, in the long run, it will lead to a cure -- although we are not there yet. But it's now we have to do it, because it takes time."
Steve McConnell, senior vice president for advocacy and public policy for the Alzheimer's Association, agreed.
"The good thing is that we know that we don't even have to cure this disease to see a significant impact on the cost," said McConnell. "If we can simply delay the onset of Alzheimer's by just a few years and slow its progression, we can show enormous savings to health care programs. And the reason is that if the patients are quite elderly, they will die of something else and they won't have to experience this disease."
McConnell noted that in the United States, in particular, a rapidly aging population will translate into a rapid increase in the country's Alzheimer patient pool -- expanding to include as many as 16 million Americans by the middle of the century.
And he noted that the U.S. figures outlined in the Swedish study were actually "very conservative." According to the Alzheimer's Association, there are 4.5 million Americans with Alzheimer's disease.
McConnell said research-funding increases are urgently needed to address a looming Alzheimer's health care crisis.
"If you factor in the informal care of family members and the costs to business of lost productivity and absenteeism, you just see the numbers go higher and higher," McConnell said. "If we don't get this disease under control, the impact on worldwide economies will be back-breaking."
More information
For more on Alzheimer's disease, check out the The Alzheimer's Association.
