Cost analysis of early psychosocial intervention in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Background/aim: To investigate the impact of early psychosocial intervention aimed at patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and their caregivers on resource use and costs from a societal perspective.

Methods: Dyads of patients and their primary caregiver were randomised to intervention (n = 163) or control (n = 167) and followed for 3 years. Health care use was extracted from national registers, and the Resource Utilisation in Dementia questionnaire was used to measure informal care and productivity loss. Multiple imputation was used to replace missing data, and non-parametric bootstrapping was used to estimate standard errors.

Results: Overall, there were no statistically significant differences because of large variation in the observations. The average additional cost of psychosocial intervention provision was estimated at EUR 3,401 per patient. This cost masked a reduced use of formal health care and an increased use of informal care.

Conclusions: Early psychosocial intervention in AD could be cost-saving from a health care perspective, whereas the opposite seems to be true from a broader societal perspective.