Valuing quality of life for people living with dementia: The AD-5D project
Speaker: Kim-Huong Nguyen, Centre for Health Services Research (UQ)
Time & date: 11am-12pm, Monday 6 September 2021
Location: Room 14-522 Sir Llew Edwards Executive Boardroom (West Wing)
About the seminar
Dementia is now the second leading cause of death for Australians and the total number of people living with dementia worldwide is projected to nearly double every 20 years, to 65.7 million in 2030. The social and economic costs of dementia are significant and in 2016 were estimated at AU$14.25 billion and worldwide costs in 2010 of US$604 billion.
Although there is currently no cure for dementia, a range of interventions have been trialled to relieve symptoms in an effort to both extend the length of life and improve the quality of life for people living with dementia. Cost utility analysis, where quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are used to measure outcomes, has been the dominant method to decide whether or not a dementia intervention should be publicly funded. EQ-5D-3L and HUI are the two dominant instruments used in the literature to derive the utility weight for QALY calculation. However, they are not dementia-specific and do not cover domains that are relevant to the quality of life of people with dementia.
The AD-5D project, funded by the NHMCR’s Cognitive Decline Partnership Centre, aims at developing and valuing a dementia-specific quality of life descriptive system. The system was derived from one of the most widely-administered instruments for assessing health-related quality of life for people with dementia, the quality of life in Alzheimer’s disease (QOL-AD). The AD-5D contains five domains: physical health, mood, memory, living situation and ability to do things for fun. We conducted online surveys of the Australian general population and interviews with people with dementia and their carers to understand how they value these five domains, from which a set of utility weights for the AD-5D have been developed.
About the presenter
Dr Nguyen is a research fellow in health economics at the Faculty of Medicine (UQ). She applies health economic theories and methods to understand the social and economic values of health and social care and draw policies that improve the values of services (through improving quality and operational efficiency) and achieve equal distribution of service access and utilisation, especially for the disadvantaged groups.
Her current research activities cover evaluating interventions and health outcomes in the older population and people with brain injury and cognitive impairment and measurement of efficiency and equity in the health and social care sectors. She works closely with researchers from multiple backgrounds, from engineers to medical professionals and artists, industries partners, advocates and consumers of health and social care services. She became an Atlantic Fellow in Equity in Brain Health in 2020. Her host institution is the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland).