New Delhi: A computer simulation model has shown that four dementia-care interventions reduced nursing home admissions and improved quality of life compared to usual care, thereby, proving their effectiveness and economy, according to researchers.
The researchers said that while Alzheimer‘s drugs hold great promise and tend to receive a lot of public attention, many well-researched ways to care for people with dementia do not involve medication. These methods could also help them stay safely at home longer.
“Now that we can show that these effective interventions can also save money, it just makes sense to find ways to make them available to more families,” said lead study author Eric Jutkowitz, an associate professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health, US.
“These interventions can be used to help people with dementia starting today,” he said.
The model has been published in Alzheimer‘s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
The interventions studied included these: Maximizing Independence at Home, involving care planning, skill-building and care monitoring delivered at-home, New York University Caregiver, providing caregivers with six counselling sessions over four months plus support, Alzheimer’s and Dementia Care, a needs assessment provided by a health care system for people with dementia and their caregivers and Adult Day Service Plus, augmenting adult day care services with staff providing face-to-face caregiver support, disease education and skill-building.
Empowering family caregivers with knowledge, skills and support tailored to their care challenges had shown to improve quality of life for both the caregiver and the person living with dementia. Along with reducing nursing home admissions, they were associated with fewer adverse events such as hospitalizations and mortality.
The scientists said that despite being well-studied, such interventions have not been widely implemented in clinical care centres owing to infrastructural limitations such as fewer mechanisms in place to reimburse providers and support these methods of care.
In this study, the researchers simulated the likelihood of nursing home admission for four evidence-based Alzheimer’s and dementia nonpharmacological interventions compared to usual care. Each intervention was evaluated for societal costs, quality-adjusted life-years and cost-effectiveness.
The inputs for simulation were based on data from US government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, clinical trials and national surveys.
A future analysis will look at similar non-drug interventions that reduce or maintain functional decline and challenging behaviours. The researchers are also designing a trial that would test these interventions with patients in a health care setting.
