Status of treatment for dementia patients who visited hospital as the first visit

We are approaching a period of population ageing in which the number of dementia patients will increase rapidly and become a significant social problem. There are many study guides for treatment of dementia, but there are limited numbers of studies and limited amounts of data available for evaluating the treatment used on dementia patients as related to their hospital for the first time. A study was performed using information gathered from 50 domestic hospitals to ensure that the treatment status data was representative of the actual field of clinical dementia. We observed retrospectively the medical records of 4282 patients who visited the hospital and were finally judged to have dementia from January, 2009 to December, 2010. Among the types of dementia, Alzheimer's disease (AD) had the greatest occurrence at 66.57%, with vascular dementia (VD) at 17.63%, AD with CVD at 10.18%, and Parkinson related dementia at 4.25%. The drug primarily used for initial therapy is the same drug primarily used for patients who have undergone long term dementia treatment, namely donepezil (75.22%). Among all 4282 patients, there was addition or transition of drugs used for 389 of the patients. Ineffectiveness of the initial drug treatment was the reason for the addition of drugs or transition to other drugs in almost all cases. In this study, the clinical characteristics observed for dementia treatment is compared as drugs changing, which will be helpful in the preparation of a treatment guide for dementia in the future.