Economic Evaluations of Interventions for Dementia Caregivers
Summary
Economic evaluations of interventions for dementia caregivers have become integral to guiding policy and funding decisions in the context of rapidly ageing populations. These analyses compare the costs and outcomes of support programmes designed to maintain carers’ mental health, delay institutionalisation of care recipients and optimise resource use. Interventions range from multicomponent coping strategies and structured family meetings to digital and culturally adapted support modules. Methodological approaches include cost‐effectiveness and cost‐utility analyses, often modelling long‐term impacts on quality‐adjusted life years (QALYs), service expenditure and informal care contributions. Studies typically adopt a societal perspective, capturing direct medical and social care costs alongside informal caregiving time. The mounting evidence underlines that well-targeted, evidence-based interventions can yield net savings or favourable cost-effectiveness ratios, while improving carers’ well-being and sustaining community-based care. As dementia prevalence and associated care costs rise globally, robust economic appraisals ensure that interventions deliver value for money and inform scalable implementation strategies.
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Economic Evaluations of Interventions for Dementia Caregivers publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in economic evaluations of interventions for dementia caregivers across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Quality-adjusted life year (QALY): A measure combining length and quality of life, used to assess the value gained from healthcare interventions.
Incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER): The additional cost per additional unit of effect (e.g. per QALY) when comparing two interventions.
Cost-utility analysis: A form of economic evaluation that expresses outcomes in QALYs, facilitating comparison across diverse health programmes.
Societal perspective: An analytic viewpoint that includes direct medical costs, social care costs and the economic value of informal caregiving.
Microsimulation: A modelling technique that simulates individual life courses to project population-level costs and outcomes over time.
References
- The value of supportive care: A systematic review of cost-effectiveness of non-pharmacological interventions for dementia. PLOS ONE (2023).
- Scaling‐up an evidence‐based intervention for family carers of people with dementia: Current and future costs and outcomes. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (2024).
- The cost-effectiveness of a family meetings intervention to prevent depression and anxiety in family caregivers of patients with dementia: a randomized trial. Trials (2013).
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