MedPage Today – Men had higher mortality and hospitalization rates after a dementia diagnosis compared with women, even after controlling for age and comorbidities, a study of 5.7 million Medicare beneficiaries showed.
Crude 1-year mortality rates were lower for women with incident dementia compared with men.
After adjusting for age, race, ethnicity, Medicaid dual eligibility, medical comorbidity burden, and access to healthcare resources, the hazard of death associated with male sex was 1.24, said Jay Lusk, MD, MBA, of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and co-authors.
Likewise, all-cause hospitalizations were lower for women with newly diagnosed dementia.
The adjusted hazard ratio of hospitalization associated with male sex was 1.08, Lusk and colleagues reported in JAMA Neurologyopens in a new tab or window.
Men also had higher rates of hospice stay, neuroimaging services, and hospitalization for neurodegenerative disease diagnoses.
“We knew that, on the population level, more women than men died with dementia, but before this study we didn’t know whether that was because women with dementia had higher mortality or because more women were diagnosed with dementia in the first place,” Lusk said.
“Our paper shows that men actually have higher mortality after dementia diagnosis, showing that the reason for the higher dementia burden among women is that more women get dementia than men,” he told MedPage Today.
The study also documents important differences in healthcare services, including hospitalizations and emergency department visits, “suggesting that behavioral symptoms or caregiver resources may differ between men and women with dementia,” Lusk added.
The analysis is the largest evaluation of nationwide healthcare patterns of men and women with dementia in the U.S. to date …
