Worldwide cost of Alzheimer's disease and dementia estimated at $156 billion

The first estimate of the worldwide direct costs of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia care was released at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on the Prevention of Dementia. As a result, scientists, advocates and those affected by the disease are calling for increased funding for research and support services.

A team led by Bengt Winblad, M.D., Professor of Geriatric Medicine and Chief Physician at the Karolinska University Hospital, Huddinge and the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, estimated worldwide direct costs for dementia in 2003 at $156 billion (U.S.), based on a worldwide prevalence estimate of 27.7 million people with dementia.

“This study represents a significant step forward in confirming what we’re up against,” said William Thies, Ph.D., Alzheimer’s Association vice president of Medical & Scientific Affairs. “Our choice is now clearer than ever. Either increase funding for Alzheimer’s disease research to fend off this looming public health disaster, or sit back and wait for it to overwhelm the healthcare systems in the U.S. and throughout the world.”

On Tuesday afternoon, researchers attending the Alzheimer’s Association Prevention Conference will visit with members of Congress on the Hill to advocate for legislation such as the Ronald Reagan Alzheimer’s Breakthrough Act. The bill, named after President Reagan who passed away from Alzheimer’s in 2004, authorizes Congress to double federal funding for Alzheimer’s disease research to $1.4 billion annually. It would also provide a tax credit up to $3,000 to help family caregivers pay for prescription drugs, home health and day care costs of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

The worldwide costs of dementia were estimated from prevalence figures for the different regions and cost-of-illness studies from key countries. The researchers used a model based on the relationship between direct costs of care per demented individual and the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in each country. As part of the research, several alternative calculation methods were explored and compared.

“It is of great interest for policy makers to have a view of how costs of dementia are distributed worldwide, and therefore we have tried to make a worldwide estimate,” Winblad said. “Since detailed national data are lacking from many countries, we based our cost estimate on an assumed relationship between the GDP per capita and direct costs of dementia care. Such a relationship is known to be valid for overall costs of healthcare.”

According to Winblad, the range in the study’s sensitivity analysis was $129-159 billion (U.S.). Due to several sources of uncertainty, the range of cost estimates is relatively wide. However, the relative lack of precision should not obscure the fact that these are huge sums of money and, according to current population and prevalence estimates, these sums will continue to grow.

“Dementia care is a mix of formal and informal caregiving and this mix is not uniform throughout the world,” Winblad said. “Even among the advanced economies there is a great range in how dementia care is provided, due to differences in family patterns, traditions, economic strength, care organization and financing. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the worldwide costs are substantial and the expected increase of elderly people, especially the anticipated rapid increase in developing countries, presents a great challenge for social and healthcare systems.”

Currently, 92 percent of the total worldwide costs of dementia care were found in what the researchers termed “the advanced economies,” which contain 38 percent of the prevalence.