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Dementia: still muddling along?

Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: GPs need more guidelines like fish need more bicycles. Guideline production has become something of a growth industry, and sifting through the output from professional bodies, special interest groups, and regulators like the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to make sense of their advice is a huge task. Paying too much attention to guidelines may not be worthwhile, partly because all too often they overvalue professional judgements in the weighting of evidence, and partly because they have remarkably little impact on practice. So the new guidelines on dementia care,1 jointly produced at the end of 2006 by NICE and its sister organisation the Social Care Institute of Excellence (SCIE), may well be left on the shelf and forgotten. Most GPs will do this, and probably no great harm will come to them and their patients as a result. Many may correctly note the lack of robust evidence of effectiveness for many aspects of treatment and support in dementia care, and opt to muddle along as normal, unimpressed by the attention given to NICE's output by other European health services.2 However, some practitioners will need to pay attention to the recommendations, for four reasons. The first is that the incidence and prevalence of dementia syndromes appear to be increasing. In the 1990s it was estimated that a GP in the UK with a typical list-size could expect a caseload of 10 and an incidence of 1.6 new patients with dementia per year.3 Given the ageing of the European population,4–6 the incidence of dementia at the beginning of the 21st century is likely to be 10 new cases per 1000 people per year. The human suffering that neurodegenerative diseases carry with them is difficult to quantify, but with progressive disorders that can evolve …
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2143995701
FWCI: 0.343
Cites: 21
Cited by: 5
Related to: 10