People tend to move more often after being diagnosed with dementia, compared to other illnesses It's possible they do so to be closer to potential caregivers In most cases, the move is to another house or apartment, rather than into a nursing home THURSDAY, Oct. 17, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- A new diagnosis of or other dementia often spurs a person to move from their home, new research shows. “One possible explanation is that individuals with dementia and their caregivers may choose to move closer to family or informal caregivers, either with independent housing arrangements or entering formal long-term care services,” wrote a team led by , an associate professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown University in Providence, R.
I. The study was published Oct. 14 in the journal .
The researchers used Medicare data on the residential histories of over 1.6 million Medicare beneficiaries. All had received a diagnosis of either dementia, heart attack, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or colon cancer in 2016.
Each person's domicile (including nursing homes) was tracked over the eight years before and after the 2016 diagnosis -- 2012 through 2020. In the four years before a dementia diagnosis, there was no difference observed in where people lived or whether they relocated, the study found. However, within the four years of a dementia diagnosis, 22% of people moved to a different U.
S. county, Rahman's group found. That's a 40% jump in relocations compared t.