Evaluating QOL of Elderly People with Dementia / 薬剤疫学

ABSTRACT

Quality of Life (QOL) is attracting attention as a concept which pursues the humanity of patients in contrast to conventional treatment which mainly consists of treatment for sustaining life. In particular, as senile dementia is one of the diseases for which a complete cure is not available to date and for which the main goal of medical treatment and care is improvement in QOL, appropriate evaluation of the effectiveness of treatment for elderly people with dementia cannot be employed without evaluating their QOL.<BR>As well, in the field of pharmacoepidemiology, with the development of antidementia drugs for Alzheimer's disease (AD), utilization of a QOL scale in evaluating drug efficacy has become an important subject. Considering the characteristics of dementia, it is not necessarily easy to evaluate how much QOL improvement antidementia drugs bring about, because many patients have difficulty in evaluating themselves. Therefore, in addition to QOL evaluation, utilizing objective evaluation by observing patients'behavior or the scale measuring the patients'preferences should be examined.<BR>Furthermore, maintaining QOL of caregivers is an important issue as this is closely related with QOL of patients themselves. To care for elderly people with dementia, a caregiver such as a patient's family member shoulders significant mental/physical burden, which could lead to “collapse by caring”. Therefore, in evaluating antidementia drugs, it is necessary to take QOL of caregivers as well as the patients themselves into consideration.