The Effects of COVID-19 on Clinical Care of People with Alzheimer’s Disease

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly impacted both clinical and non-clinical care of people living with dementia. This project establishes a new research collaboration between the NBER Center and the Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Project (FHS-BAP) at Boston University, and through that collaboration, studies The Effects of COVID-19 on Clinical Care of People with Alzheimer’s Disease. The parent grant, NBER Center for Aging and Health Research, integrates into a unified programmatic structure a larger collection of NBER research activities on health at older ages, as well as incubating new research networks on related issues. While the parent grant is not focused on Alzheimer’s Disease, the supplement adds an important clinical dimension to the Center’s other developmental research activities on ADRD and, importantly, facilitates broader researcher access to a rich new data resource that links data from the Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Project with Medicare claims. The proposed analytic work adds COVID-19 infection, symptoms, and other related measures to existing economic models for health care utilization and costs; identifies patients with COVID-19 onset in Framingham Heart Study C4R data; and uses the data to characterize patterns of health care utilization and costs for AD and for AD-related co-morbid diseases/risk factors – before and through the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project also builds a new linked data infrastructure that combines FHS, CMS, and other data; facilitates wider use of these data; and creates new opportunities for collaborative work between economics researchers and biomedical researchers in studying the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic, clinical care for people living with dementia, and health outcomes.