Monetary Costs of Healthcare Use Associated with Dementia in Europe

Background: With the increase of the elderly population in Europe, the dementia cases are also increasing every year. The impact of dementia in society is relatively significant. On the one hand, the healthcare costs for patients with dementia are high which makes them difficult to finance. On the other hand, dementia involves an important amount of informal care. The aim of this thesis is to estimate the total costs of the healthcare use associated with dementia. Methods: The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is used and the target population is adults aged 50 years or older. The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is used to estimate the number of people with dementia. Afterwards, panel data are used and a fixed effect model is performed to estimate the total costs and the cost per case. Results: The results show that the total cost of dementia are estimated to be 10.1 billion euros and the projections for the following years are expected to increase. In particular, the annual costs of dementia per case are 1,866 euros. In addition, formal care and informal care are found to be the most relevant contributors of the dementia costs. The estimations of this study differ across regions and are also found to be lower than other research studies performed due to methodological issues, such as different cost approaches or dementia prevalence. Conclusions: This thesis provides new information of the costs of dementia. The total cost of healthcare use associated with dementia are high and they are expected to increase in the near future. Additionally, formal and informal care are the key contributors to the costs of dementia. Public health care policies would be needed to decrease not only the burden of the disease to society but also the costs.