The Potential Impact of Alzheimer's Disease Early Treatment on Societal Costs of Care in Czechia: A Simulation Approach.

DISCUSSION: The results suggest that early treatment of AD would decrease costs of care in Czechia. The main limitation of the simulation arises from the fact that missing domestic information was substituted by input from foreign clinical trials or simplifying assumptions. Because of insufficient data, we do not model hospitalization risk; on the other hand, introduction of this risk into our model would likely increase the savings from early treatment. IMPLICATIONS FOR HEALTH POLICIES: Makers of AD policies ought to appreciate the trade-off between costs of daily assistance in untreated patients and health care costs in treated patients, notwithstanding that the costs of assistance are largely born by households rather than public budgets. Our results show that the savings on costs of assistance brought about by early treatment would exceed the additional costs of treatment. IMPLICATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH: A number of missing or insufficient data about the Czech Alzheimer's population were identified. In addition, to determine the total societal cost-effect of early treatment, further research ought to evaluate the related increase in detection costs. Finally, it should also assess cost-effectiveness of early treatment by considering its impact on patients' utility. PMID: 30676992 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics - Category: Psychiatry Tags: J Ment Health Policy Econ Source Type: research