Costs of care for people with dementia aged 75 and over. Funded/commissioned by: Pfizer Ltd

<p>This report is based on analysis of data from the Cambridge cohort study of elderly people with dementia (Ely et al, 1995),<p><p>utilising re-analyses performed by Economists Advisory Group (EAG), on behalf of Pfizer Ltd. The clinical data has been combined with costing figures from a programme of work based at the PSSRU (Kavanagh et al, 1993; Schneider et al, 1993; Kavanagh et al, 1995). The report evaluates the changing average cost of care as the cognitive level of a given person changes. The Cambridge study provides figures for cumulative distributions of scores that have been used to map from MMSE to OPCS SEVINT scores. This facilitates the use of Kavanagh (1995) figures to establish a distribution of locations and types of care at given levels of severity. The proportions are combined with costs to give an average cost. All estimates are restricted to direct costs of health and social care and do not reflect variations in informal care and indirect costs. The costs show a variation, with a general upwards trend matching the upward trend in severity. This rate of change of severity is not uniform, with variations between different sectors of the population, dependent on age and severity of dementia. Annual rates of change are used as the basis for extrapolation of the data over a period of eight years, showing longer term changes in severity for any given individual. These long term changes have some apparently anomalous effects on the pattern and distribution of costs. A set of more complex models will be developed, based on the work within this report.