Cost of Illness of Alzheimer's Disease: Case Study from Selected Region in the Czech Republic

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is an incurable, degenerative, irreversible health condition affecting memory and thinking abilities due to neuron's reduction. These affect the ability to carry out the simplest tasks. AD is a severe health condition bringing burden not only to the patient but to health and social systems and, especially, to families who become informal and, often, the predominant caregivers. Research has shown that care for an AD patient is very costly. The cost increases with the progression of the disease throughout its more progressive phases. The aim of this research article is to calculate the costs of Alzheimer's disease using a framework based on cost-of-illness methodology. The data are based on four main pillars. The first is a caregiver's questionnaire, the second, the patients case studies selected to represent each stage of the disease, the third is indepth interviews with the patients and caregivers, while the fourth is data from the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic (UZIS) which provides data of health care consumption. The results indicate that as the disease progresses, the overall cost of AD increases. The largest share of AD costs is indirect cost at each stage of the disease.