Disparity in the use of Alzheimer's disease treatment in Southern Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Marco, Maísa de
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Brandi, Ana Laura Felix dos Santos da Silva, Bieger, Andrei, Krug, Bárbara Côrrea, Pádua, Analuiza Camozzato de, Picon, Paulo Dornelles, Chaves, Marcia Lorena Fagundes, Castilhos, Raphael Machado de
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFRGS
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10183/266585
• topic: Doença de Alzheimer; Prescrições; Saúde pública; Análise espacial

Alzheimer's disease (AD) treatment is freely available in the Brazilian public health system. However, the prescription pattern and its associated factors have been poorly studied in our country. We reviewed all granted requests for AD treatment in the public health system in October 2021 in the Rio Grande do Sul (RS) state, Southern Brazil. We performed a spatial autocorrelation analysis with the population-adjusted patients receiving any AD medication as the outcome and correlated it with several socioeconomic variables. 2382 patients with AD were being treated during the period analyzed. The distribution of the outcome variable was not random (Moran's I 0.17562, P <.0001), with the most developed regions having a higher number of patients/100,000 receiving any AD medication. We show that although AD medications are available through the public health system, there is a clear disparity between regions of RS state. Factors related to socioeconomic development partly explain this finding.