PND47 - ECONOMIC BURDEN OF ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IN THE UK

Abstract

To collate evidence from published studies evaluating the economic burden of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in the UK. A literature search was conducted in Embase® and MEDLINE® to identify evidence published from 2013 to 2018. The studies were assessed against predefined eligibility criteria. Studies were included if they were published in English and reported economic burden associated with AD in the UK. Of the 768 publications retrieved, seven studies were included. The GERAS study reported 18-month societal costs as £37,900/patient (Lenox-Smith et al., 2016). Also, mean informal caregiver costs were higher among patients with moderately severe/severe AD (£24,672) compared to those with moderate (£17,007) and mild (£15,678) AD. The LASER-AD study reported significantly higher average per capita annual costs for AD patients with neuropsychiatric inventory (NPI) agitation scores >3 than those with NPI scores ≤3 (£38,910 vs £27,752; p<0.001) (Morris et al., 2015). The DADE study reported higher mean non-medical costs of care for AD patients compared to mean medical costs of care over a period of 3 months (£,2924 versus £1,094) (Jones et al. 2015). The study by Chen and colleagues reported a higher mean rate of hospitalisation for AD patients compared to patients without AD (23.3% versus 18.4%; p<0.0001) (Chen et al., 2014). Another study reported the mean number of hospital days for AD patients as 6.92 days per person-year (Mueller et al., 2018). Furthermore, AD patients had either a general hospital admission (37.04%) or care home admission (11.73%), and 6.34% of patients received at least one mental health inpatient admission during 6-month study period (Knapp et., 2016). There is a high economic burden of AD in the UK. The major contributing factors are disease severity (including NPI agitation score) and hospital admissions.