WEDNESDAY, Feb. 11, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- Collaborative care programs providing dementia-related medical and psychosocial support via interdisciplinary teams led by a dementia specialist offer considerable health and economic benefits, according to a study published online Feb. 5 in Alzheimer's & Dementia: Behavior & Socioeconomics of Aging.
Kelly J. Atkins, D.Psych., from the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues modeled people with Alzheimer disease aged 71 years across three scenarios to examine outcomes: 18 months of lecanemab, collaborative care, and combined interventions.
The researchers found that compared with usual care, collaborative care increased quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) by 0.26, with savings of $48,000 per person. An additional 0.16 QALY was yielded by adding lecanemab to collaborative care, at a total cost of $218,000 per QALY and $248,000 per QALY (societal perspective and health care perspective, respectively). Lecanemab yielded 180,000 QALYs at a cost of $39.5 billion when scaled to the U.S. population; collaborative care yielded 1.5 million QALYs and saved $300 billion.
"We're going to see more drugs and better drugs soon, and I think that's very exciting. But we can't just focus on the drugs, we need to rethink our system of care," coauthor Katherine L. Possin, Ph.D., also from the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, said in a statement. "Clinics that integrate collaborative care with the drugs may be best positioned to meet the needs of patients in this new treatment era."