The Value of a Year's General Education for Reducing the Symptoms of Dementia

We present a method for estimating the benefits of years of education for reducing dementia symptoms based on the cost-savings that would accrue from continuing independent living rather than relying on formal or informal caregivers. Our method for estimating the benefits of education involves three steps: first taking a year of education and seeing how much this lowers dementia; secondly using this dementia reduction and estimating how much independent living is affected; and thirdly applying the change in caregiving costs associated with the independent living change. We apply our method for estimating education benefits to a National Alzheimer Coordinating Center (NACC) sample of 17,239 participants at 32 US Alzheimer's Disease Centers over the period September 2005 and May 2015