Costs for Dementia Care Far Exceeding Other Diseases, Study Finds
Resource type: News
The New York Times | [ View Original Source (opens in new window) ]
By Gina Kolata
Three diseases, leading killers of Americans, often involve long periods of decline before death. Two of them — heart disease and cancer — usually require expensive drugs, surgeries and hospitalizations. The third, dementia, has no effective treatments to slow its course.
So when a group of researchers asked which of these diseases involved the greatest health care costs in the last five years of life, the answer they found might seem surprising. The most expensive, by far, was dementia.