Clinical Pathway for Alzheimer's Disease in China (CPAD)

Overview

There are guidelines on the management of AD in China, the evidence adopted in the guidelines are mostly from the trials conducted in other countries due to very limited Chinese data available for local systematic review. Therefore, more local evidence on dementia care is needed for the development of an evidence-based guideline appropriate for people living in China. Meanwhile, the inadequate implementation of the current AD guideline, which results in the low diagnostic rate and high diagnostic leakage, may bring about extra barriers for AD patients to access dementia care service in different areas nationwide. However, there is no data on the clinical pathway about how physicians follow the dementia guideline in the routine practice. Therefore, research is needed to learn clinical diagnostic process and treatment patterns of physicians to people with AD in routine practice and help address the low accurate rate of AD clinical diagnosis and low anti-dementia drug prescription in the real world and support guideline development.

Outpatients who are visiting memory clinics and who are judged by physicians with clinically significant cognitive impairment will be invited to join the study during the study recruiting period (with informed consent signed). * Patients enrolled into the study will be evaluated and diagnosed by participating physicians and may or may not be prescribed with therapy (pharmaceutical and/or non-pharmaceutical) based on physicians' medical judgment. * For patients with routine clinical follow-up visits, their medical charts will be reviewed for documentation. The procedures of making diagnosis and developing treatment scheme will be retrieved and documented in clinical report form (CRF). Additional procedures ordered by the participating physician at current visits will also be documented in CRF. All participants will be followed twice after baseline visit to re-evaluate and confirm the initial diagnosis (where applicable), and to record compliance to treatment scheme, including the process of medication titration. This study does not recommend nor restrict any specific treatments.

Conditions