Alzheimer’s, Dementia Triple Individual Health Care Costs

According to U.S. News & World Report, a recent Alzheimer’s Association report estimates that Alzheimer’s disease and dementia triple health care costs for afflicted seniors.

Photo by DerrickT via Flickr

In its report, the Alzheimer’s Association found that:

The average annual health-care cost for someone older than 65 with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia was $33,007 in 2004 — three times more than the $10,603 for people that age without the conditions.

Deaths from Alzheimer’s disease rose by 47 percent from 2000 to 2006 while the number of deaths from several other major diseases — including heart attack, stroke, breast cancer and prostate cancer — fell during that period.

States in the Rocky Mountains and Northwest will see the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease increase by at least 81 percent between 2000 and 2025.

By 2025, California and Florida will each be home to more than a half-million people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Experts agree that the U.S. needs to invest more into Alzheimer’s research to keep costs low in the future. Some even advocate that the U.S. Government double its annual budget for Alzheimer’s research to $1 billion.

The aging of the Baby Boom Generation is one of the major reasons for the growing concern over the costs of living with Alzheimer’s disease. Said Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, a psychiatry professor at Duke University Medical Center,

The bottom line is that we are an aging society, and if we don’t find a cure to delay or halt the disease, we are soon going to become an Alzheimer’s nation.

LoJacking Grandma and “Reality Mining,” or “Daddy, What was Anonymity?”

photo by mrsmartino via flickr

Mark Heftler, a geriatric care manager who is slated to begin study at Seton Hall Law in the Fall, has written an interesting article on RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and its potential usage as a means of  early diagnosis of dementia among the elderly. Researchers at the University of South Florida have developed and tested an RFID technology which assesses the walking patterns of those which it monitors.

By monitoring the movements of the elderly within geriatric facilities, “the researchers hope to be able to diagnose the onset Alzheimer’s in their patients. Sudden veers, long pauses, and a tendency to wander are all indicators of dementia.”

As MIT’s Technology Review notes, “Drugs that are currently available can only slow the progression of related diseases, so the earlier dementia is caught, the better a patient’s treatment will be.”

Technology Review also notes, “In particular, dementia increases the risk of injury caused by a fall… ‘That’s a huge problem for assisted-living facilities,’” said  William Kearns, an assistant professor who researches aging and mental health at USF.

Not Just Grandma

Although one can readily see the positive cost/benefit and quality of life implications of warding off the falls of the elderly, as Frank Pasquale recently noted on both this blog and Concurring Opinions, the proliferation of “personal” electronic data is not without its danger.

The Technology Review article provides a link to another article which points out that RFID technology is also being harnessed to gather social networking information through what is referred to as “reality mining,”

“…a field that Tanzee­m Choudhury pioneered as a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. Working at Intel after graduation, she created a pager-size sensor pack–loaded with software plus microphones, accelerometers, and other data-gatherin­g devices–to collect and analyze data about human interactions and activity. For instance, by processing verbal utterances, she can identify the most influential people in a social network.

Now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth, Choudhury is conducting experiments with the sensor-laden iPhone. Within a few years, she says, simple versions of her software could be available for cell phones.”