Current and Future Costs of Alzheimer's and Dementia Care

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Dementia care has substantial economic costs, with consequences for health care systems and for the health and welfare of the families who provide the majority of their care. There are many studies of the costs of dementia, but they lead to widely varying estimates of the costs due to differences in the time-frame studied, the comprehensiveness of the costs included, differences in the quality of the data used, and the differences in the definition of dementia onset. These factors make the understanding the literature and painting a consistent picture of the future costs of Alzheimer's and dementia care more difficult. Our proposed study takes key steps in improving the measurement of current dementia care and improving the projections of the future burden of the disease. The specific aims of this research are to: (1) Estimate how the direct health care costs of dementia care vary with the insurance and care providers; (2) Estimate the direct and indirect costs to caregivers of dementia care; (3) Produce and calibrate a forecasting model to estimate the future costs of dementia care in order to inform resource allocation decisions.