Dementia can place a heavy physical toll on individuals with the disease (and their loved ones), but the financial burden can be intense as well. A new study shows the detrimental impact of the disease on patients’ and their loved ones’ finances. It also finds that people with dementia enter nursing homes at nearly five times the rate of their peers without dementia in the two-year period after receiving a diagnosis.
A study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine reveals that people in whom dementia has been diagnosed saw their out-of-pocket spending for healthcare more than double. At the same time, their net worth decreased by more than 60% within the first eight years of the disease being diagnosed.
Data came from 2,387 adults with the onset of dementia and their peers who were similar in socioeconomic situations but didn’t have the disease. For comparison, people who were similar in age to those studied but didn’t have dementia didn’t see much of a change in finances during that time, the report found. A team from the University of Michigan conducted the study.
Those in the study had wealth averaging $79,000 before receiving their diagnosis (people with and without dementia). The participants also had out-of-pocket medical costs totaling about $4,000. By the end of two years after diagnosis, the average wealth dropped to $58,000 in those with dementia while out-of-pocket costs increased to about $8,000. Their peers without the disease didn’t experience those financial shifts.
The study also found that people in whom dementia was diagnosed entered nursing homes at nearly five times the rate of their peers in those first two years. People with less family support were much more likely to enter a nursing home or other type of long-term care community.
Dementia also took a financial toll on family members living with the person who had the disease. After the second year from when onset began, people living with dementia needed three times more hours of care from family and friends than their peers without the disease.
And people living with dementia also were much more likely than their peers to use paid in-home care that is not fully covered by Medicare.
Perhaps not surprisingly, in the first eight years after receiving a dementia diagnosis, the number of people who went on Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides healthcare coverage to low-income adults, almost doubled, whereas it didn’t for peers without the disease.
“The differences between these two groups, both in terms of use of care and financial impacts, were even larger than we had expected,” HwaJung Choi, PhD, the study’s lead author and a health economist and research associate professor in the U-M Medical School’s Department of Internal Medicine, said in a statement.
“What we found regarding unpaid caregiving from family and others is the most striking and persistent care use difference, with 45 hours per month on average for people with dementia, compared with 13 hours for those without, by the end of two years,” Choi added. “The difference remains sustained at that level across eight years.”
