Researchers at the University of Michigan Health System and nonprofit RAND Corporation have found that we’re spending up to $215 billion a year on one disease that affects more than 4 million Americans. But if present trends continue, the condition is expected to strike 14 million by 2050.The researchers discovered that the U.S. spends up to $24.5 million an hour around the clock dealing with Alzheimer’s disease. That’s more than we spend for heart disease or cancer.
“Our findings show why dementia is sometimes described as a ‘slow-motion disaster’ for patients and families,” says researcher Kenneth Langa, M.D., Ph.D., professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. “The majority of the costs associated with dementia — about 80 percent in our study — are due to the long-term daily care and supervision provided by families and nursing homes, often for many years. Ignoring these long-term care costs that build up steadily day-after-day leads to a huge under-counting of the true burden that dementia imposes on our society.”
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“These findings reveal that the enormous emotional and physical demands of caring for people with dementia are accompanied by the similarly imposing financial burdens of dementia care,” says Richard J. Hodes, M.D., director of the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the study. “The national costs of dementia are significant and growing, and they further compel us to do all we can to find effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias as soon as possible.”
