Health promotion and chronic disease prevention in Canada : research, policy and practice
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Health Promot Chronic Dis Prev Can · Oct 2016
Describing the population health burden of depression: health-adjusted life expectancy by depression status in Canada.
Few studies have evaluated the impact of depression in terms of losses to both premature mortality and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) on the overall population. Health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) is a summary measure of population health that combines both morbidity and mortality into a single summary statistic that describes the current health status of a population. ⋯ The population of adult men and women with depression in Canada had substantially lower healthy life expectancy than those without depression. Much of this gap is explained by lower levels of HRQOL, but premature mortality also plays a role.
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Health Promot Chronic Dis Prev Can · Oct 2016
Report summary Prevalence and monetary costs of dementia in Canada (2016): a report by the Alzheimer Society of Canada.
Dementia prevalence estimates vary among population-based studies, depending on the definitions of dementia, methodologies and data sources and types of costs they use. A common approach is needed to avoid confusion and increase public and stakeholder confidence in the estimates. Since 1994, five major studies have yielded widely differing estimates of dementia prevalence and monetary costs of dementia in Canada. ⋯ The estimated monetary costs of dementia for the same year also varied, from $910 million to $33 billion. This discrepancy is largely due to three factors: (1) the lack of agreed-upon methods for estimating financial costs; (2) the unavailability of prevalence estimates for the various stages of dementia (mild, moderate and severe), which directly affect the amount of money spent; and (3) the absence of tools to measure direct, indirect and intangible costs more accurately. Given the increasing challenges of dementia in Canada and around the globe, reconciling these differences is critical for developing standards to generate reliable information for public consumption and to shape public policy and service development.