Aging & mental health
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Aging & mental health · Jan 2019
ReviewChallenges and recommendations for the health-economic evaluation of primary prevention programmes for dementia.
We aimed to review health-economic evaluations of (hypothetical) intervention programmes for the primary prevention of dementia, and highlight challenges and provide recommendations for future research to estimate its cost-effectiveness. ⋯ A few studies have evaluated a hypothetical multidomain prevention intervention, and reported that primary dementia prevention is potentially cost-saving or cost-effective. Various challenges remain to evaluate the health-economic impact of prevention interventions, including extrapolation of short-term trial effects, care costs in the dementia-free and life years gained, and accurate representation of usual care. We recommend extensive sensitivity analyses to examine the impact of assumptions regarding these aspects on the outcomes of cost-effectiveness studies.