Second International Pharmacoeconomic Conference on Alzheimer' s Disease

The Second International Pharmacoeconomic Conference on Alzheimer's Disease was held in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 4, 2000. The presentations focused on the role of cognition in pharmacoeconomic evaluations, the costs and consequences of behavioral disturbances, quality of life, disease progression models, and methods for valuing informal care. The results from individual studies will be published separately. Cognition has been used as the sole measure of disease severity in economic evaluations in dementia. However, behavioral disturbances are an important determinant of both cost and quality of life and should also be considered when appraising the effect of treatment. Quality-of-life assessment constitutes a single measure of the total impact of the disease, as well as a way of quantifying the benefits of treatment with antidementia drugs so that they can be compared with interventions in other disease areas. Measuring the quality of life of patients with dementia is associated with methodologic difficulties related to the difficulties for some patients in completing usual assessment processes. Disease progression models may be helpful in extrapolating the results from clinical trials to longer time periods and more representative populations. Modeling is an unavoidable part of the economic evaluation of antidementia drugs, and efforts should be made to increase transparency and comparability among models. Informal care constitutes a large percentage of the total care for patients with dementia, and the valuation of these services has a large impact on the results of pharmacoeconomic evaluations. Difficulties lie in quantifying the time spent on caring for the elderly and in attaching the correct price to each unit of time. The contingent valuation method is an alternative way of valuing informal care that so far has not been used in the field of dementia.