Deans' stroke musings: Cost of informal caregiving associated with stroke among the elderly in the United States

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Cost of informal caregiving associated with stroke among the elderly in the United States

And if we had a great stroke association we could reduce the caregiving needs substantially by having stopped the neuronal cascade of death. Cause and effect is so important that I wish our stroke medical staff understood the concept and used it.
http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2014/10/10/WNL.0000000000000986.short?rss=1

Heesoo Joo, PhD,
Diane O. Dunet, PhD,
Jing Fang, MD and
Guijing Wang, PhD

+Show Affiliations

Correspondence to Dr. Joo: hj528176@gmail.com

Published online before print October 10, 2014, doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000000986 Neurology 10.1212/WNL.0000000000000986

Abstract
Full Text (PDF)

Also available:
Data Supplement

Abstract

Objectives: We estimated the informal caregiving hours and costs associated with stroke.

Methods: We selected persons aged 65 years and older in 2006 and who were also included in the 2008 follow-up survey from the Health and Retirement Study. We adapted the case-control study design by using self-reported occurrence of an initial stroke event during 2006 and 2008 to classify persons into the stroke (case) and the nonstroke (control) groups. We compared informal caregiving hours between case and control groups in 2006 (prestroke period for case group) and in 2008 (poststroke period for case group) and estimated incremental informal caregiving hours attributable to stroke by applying a difference-in-differences technique to propensity score–matched populations. We used a replacement approach to estimate the economic value of informal caregiving.

Results: The weekly incremental informal caregiving hours attributable to stroke were 8.5 hours per patient. The economic value of informal caregiving per stroke survivor was $8,211 per year, of which $4,356 (53%) was attributable to stroke. At the national level, the annual economic burden of informal caregiving associated with stroke among elderly was estimated at $14.2 billion in 2008.

Conclusions: Recent changes in public health and social support policies recognize the economic burden of informal caregiving. Our estimates reinforce the high economic burden of stroke in the United States and provide up-to-date information for policy development and decision-making.