Abstract
Community pharmacists and general practitioners have daily contact with patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) but the number of positive cases constantly increases every day. Thus, the aim of this research is to describe the level of AD knowledge among community pharmacists and general practitioners in Spain, in order to see where the biggest gaps in the knowledge are. Therefore, a cross-sectional study has been carried out, using the Alzheimer’s disease knowledge survey (ADKS), among members of the Spanish Society of Primary Care Physicians and the Spanish Society of Family and Community Pharmacy to report the differences in AD knowledge in both professional collectives. The ADKS has been responded by 578 community pharmacists and 104 general practitioners and consists of a battery of 30 questions, whose possible answers are true or false. It assesses the AD knowledge in seven areas (impact on the disease, risk factors, course of the disease, diagnosis, care, treatment and symptoms). Results indicate that Spanish pharmacists and general practitioners have a high personal knowledge of AD, nevertheless, it is not associated with greater awareness. Both scored above 80% at the categories: diagnostic, treatment and symptoms. However, lower knowledge level (60% of correct answers) was found in those related to risk factors, such as the ignorance about hypercholesterolemia or hypertension as risk factors for the disease. Community pharmacists are already acting to control cardiovascular risk factors, but a wider knowledge of the relationship of these factors to AD is needed to act against these silent risk factors. Thus, pharmacists may also be involved in the management of AD that includes recognizing early symptoms for early detection of cognitive impairment. Hence, knowledge about risk factors is very important in developing this expanding role.
Highlights
The aging of the world population is a reality
An inconvenience was the low participation of general practitioners in the online survey, it forced a spreading of the responses of this group through the utilization of hard copies, making us of a conference held in SEMERGEN association to medical residents. 104 responses from general practitioners were obtained (38 via web and 66 printed questionnaires), increasing the participation to 13%
There is only an article that measures the level of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) knowledge among caregivers and general population that has just been published and allows us to have an overall comparison in order to describe the view of AD knowledge in Spain, both among health professionals, caregivers (19.2) and general population (18.9) (Jorge et al, 2018)
Summary
The aging of the world population is a reality. It is expected to increase to 85 years by 2040; the prevalence of chronic diseases such as dementia remains longer and in a greater proportion in the population (WHO, 2007; WHO, 2017; Martínez‐Lage et al, 2018). Around 50 million people suffer from dementia worldwide and it is expected to rise to 75 million in 2030 and 132 million in 2050. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia, corresponding to 60–80% of the cases. It affects more than one million people to whom the undiagnosed cases should be added and that perturbs the lives of 4.5 million people among patients and carers (Prince et al, 2015)
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