Effectiveness of Reducing Disability in Alzheimer's Disease Among Dyads With Moderate Dementia

Replications of evidence-based dementia care receiver-caregiver dyad interventions in the community are scarce. We aimed to assess the effectiveness of the Kansas City implementation of Reducing Disability in Alzheimer's Disease (RDAD) among a convenience sample of dyads with moderate dementia, which addressed needs identified by nine participating community agencies. We hypothesized that dyads' mental health and physical activity outcomes would improve from baseline to end-of-treatment. The final analytic sample included 66 dyads. Outcomes improved (p< .01) from pre- to post-intervention: behavioral symptom severity (range 0-36) decreased from 11.3 to 8.6, physical activity increased from 125.0 to 190.0 min/week, caregiver unmet needs (range 0-34) decreased from 10.6 to 5.6, caregiver behavioral symptom distress (0-60) decreased from 15.5 to 10.4, and caregiver strain (0-26) decreased from 11.1 to 9.7. This adapted implementation of RDAD leads to clinically meaningful improvements and might inform scaling-up.

Automated summary

This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Kansas City implementation of the Reducing Disability in Alzheimer's Disease (RDAD) program, which targeted dyads with moderate dementia and caregivers, resulting in improvements in behavioral symptoms, physical activity, unmet needs, behavioral symptom distress, and caregiver strain from baseline to post-intervention. These findings suggest that the adapted RDAD intervention led to clinically meaningful improvements and may be scalable.