Poster Presentations

Session Title: Alzheimer's Disease (AD) including Non-Cognitive Aspects
Presentation Date: Friday, March 14 – Saturday, March 15, 2009

BENEFITS OF MEMANTINE TREATMENT TRANSLATE INTO A REDUCTION OF HEALTH-ECONOMIC COSTS

A. Wimo¹, Y. Wirth^2
1Karolinska Institute, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Stockholm, Sweden, ²Merz Pharmaceuticals, Frankfurt, Germany

In addition to the substantial personal and social effects on patients and carer, Alzheimer's disease (AD) also has a considerable pharmacoeconomic impact for healthcare providers. The pharmacoeconomics of AD care are complex, with the main proportion of costs relating to the more advanced stages of the illness, and with institutional care and patient dependency level being the main cost drivers.
Memantine is a drug treatment that can produce significant cognitive, functional, behavioural, and global benefits in patients with moderate to severe AD and, therefore, may be expected to influence healthcare costs.
Data from a Phase III, placebo-controlled, 28-week study of memantine (20 mg/day) vs placebo (Reisberg et al, 2003), were prospectively analysed using the Resource Utilisation in Dementia (RUD) instrument (Wimo et al, 2003). Analysis showed that memantine treatment significantly reduced caregiving time (~ 52 hours; p = 0.02 vs placebo). Tasks that accounted for caregiver time included assisting the patient with dressing, eating, toileting, etc., which are all functional elements that memantine specifically improved in single-item analyses (Doody et al, 2004). In addition, significantly fewer patients receiving memantine moved from a community to an institutional setting during the study (p = 0.04 vs placebo). From a societal perspective, these improvements resulted in mean total cost savings of 1,090 US dollars per month per patient.
Therefore, memantine may be cost-effective treatment for patients with moderate to severe AD, reducing caregiving time, and providing cost savings from a societal perspective.