Sex Differences in Dementia Primary Care Performance and Health Service Use: A Population‐Based Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Growing evidence points to underlying sex differences in the risk factors and clinical presentation of dementia. It is unclear, however, whether sex differences also exist in the management and healthcare utilization of persons with dementia. We compared primary care performance and health service use indicators for newly identified men and women with dementia in Ontario, Canada, over a 12-year period. DESIGN: Population-based, repeated cohort study between 2002 and 2014. SETTING: Ontario, Canada. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 318 350 community-dwelling adults, aged 65 years and older, newly identified with dementia, followed for up to 1 year. MEASUREMENTS: Eighteen indicators of primary care performance and health service use were assessed. RESULTS: Approximately 60% of the study population were women. Few differences in the indicators were observed between sexes, although men had fewer diagnoses first recorded by the family physician, more visits to noncognition specialists, less use of home care, more hospitalizations and readmissions, and longer discharge delays. Most indicators remained relatively stable over time for both men (median relative change = 13.7%; interquartile range [IQR] = 4.5%-29.7%) and women (median relative change = 15.7%; IQR = 5.9%-31.5%). Notable improvements over time for both sexes included access to an interprofessional primary care team, use of home care, and decreased use of long-term care. Areas of worsening included a higher occurrence of emergency department visits, lower continuity of care, and longer discharge delays. CONCLUSION: These findings raise awareness on the similarities and differences in management and health system use for men and women newly diagnosed with dementia, particularly the imbalance in hospital and home care use. As health systems continue to adapt to meet the needs of the growing dementia population, policy makers and clinicians should be mindful to develop care plans and interventions that consider the influence of sex on the need for services. J Am Geriatr Soc 68:1056-1063, 2020.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".