Monetary Costs of Dementia in the United States
By M. Hurd, P. Martorell, Adeline Delavande, Kathleen J. Mullen, Kenneth M. Langa. New England Journal of Medicine, 2013
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BACKGROUND Dementia affects a large and growing number of older adults in the United States. The monetary costs attributable to dementia are likely to be similarly large and to continue to increase. METHODS In a subsample (856 persons) of the population in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative longitudinal study of older adults, the diagnosis of dementia was determined with the use of a detailed in-home cognitive assessment that was 3 to 4 hours in duration and a review by an expert panel. We then imputed cognitive status to the full HRS sample (10,903 persons, 31,936 person-years) on the basis of measures of cognitive and functional status available for all HRS respondents, thereby identifying persons in the larger sample with a high probability of dementia. The market costs associated with care for persons with dementia were determined on the basis of self-reported out-of-pocket spending and the utilization of nursing home care; Medicare claims data were used to identify costs paid by Medicare. Hours of informal (unpaid) care were valued either as the cost of equivalent formal (paid) care or as the estimated wages forgone by informal caregivers. RESULTS The estimated prevalence of dementia among persons older than 70 years of age in the United States in 2010 was 14.7%. The yearly monetary cost per person that was attributable to dementia was either $56,290 (95% confidence interval [CI], $42,746 to $69,834) or $41,689 (95% CI, $31,017 to $52,362), depending on the method used to value informal care. These individual costs suggest that the total monetary cost of dementia in 2010 was between $157 billion and $215 billion. Medicare paid approximately $11 billion of this cost. CONCLUSIONS Dementia represents a substantial financial burden on society, one that is similar to the financial burden of heart disease and cancer. (Funded by the National Institute on Aging.)
Subfields: Demography, General Health Professions, Psychiatry and Mental health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bc3dccab94cd5cd3fa6fe253596cd19dda72f26b
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Citations in the corpus
- The worldwide costs of dementia 2015 and comparisons with 2010 (2017, background): “Cost of illness (COI) estimates have improved, with more recent and comprehensive studies carried out across the world.”
- Alzheimer’s disease drug-development pipeline: few candidates, frequent failures (2014, neutral): “economy than cardiovascular disease or cancer [31].”
- Cohort Profile: the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). (2014, positive): “Other studies report on factors that may influence cognitive change,(33,34) the consequences of cognitive decline(35) and the monetary costs to society.(36) A number of studies have investigated the impact of retirement on cognitive functioning.”
- 2016 Alzheimer's disease facts and figures (2016, positive): “Recently, researchers evaluated the additional or “incremental” health care and caregiving costs of dementia (that is, the costs specifically attributed to dementia when comparing people with and without dementia who have the same coexisting medical conditions and demographic characteristics) [207,3”
- Dying in America: improving quality and honoring individual preferences near the end of life. (2015, background): “In 2010, the annual costs of caring for Americans with dementia, including both medical and nursing home care and unpaid care (mostly by family members), were estimated at $157-$215 billion, depending on how informal care was valued (Hurd et al., 2013); for Parkinson’s disease, the estimated direct ”
- The Global Demography of Aging: Facts, Explanations, Future (2016, positive): “Recent credible estimates place the prevalence of dementia at around 14 percent for the U.S. 70+ population using data from the Health and Retirement Survey (Hurd et al., 2013; Plassman et al., 2007).”
- Advancing Alzheimer Disease Prediction With Large Language Model–Based Linguistic Feature Analysis: Development and Validation Study (2026, unknown): “These alarming figures highlight the critical need for early detection and intervention strategies to improve patient outcomes, optimize treatment strategies, and reduce the burden on health care systems [4].”