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Featured publications

Theme: Diagnosis and prognosis

Hybrid simulation modelling for dementia care services planning

Evenden D, Brailsford SC, Kipps CM, Roderick PJ and Walsh B

Dementia is an increasing problem in today’s ageing society, and meeting future demand for care is a major concern for policy-makers and planners. This paper presents a novel hybrid simulation model that simultaneously takes population-level and patient-level perspectives to calculate the numbers of patients at different stages of disease severity over time, and their associated care costs. System Dynamics is used at population level to capture ageing, dementia onset, and all-cause mortality, whereas disease progression is modelled at individual patient level using Agent-Based methods. This enables the model to account for variability between patients in the rate of cognitive decline, dementia-related mortality and response to treatment interventions. Using epidemiological data from the medical literature, disease progression is modelled via a longitudinal clustering method to identify progression type, followed by mixed-effects regression to reflect each individual’s rate of cognitive decline. Results are presented for population data from the south of England, and show that the currently available interventions have only modest effects at population level.

Researchers:

Portrait image of Chris Kipps

Professor Chris Kipps

Role: Consultant Neurologist

Chris is a Consultant Neurologist with subspecialty interest in behavioural neurology and cognitive disorders, and Professor of Clinical Neurology and Dementia at University Hospital Southampton and the University of Southampton. He leads the Cognitive Disorders service at the Wessex Neurological Centre.

Chris is Clinical Director for Research and Development at...

Portrait image of Dave Evenden

Dr Dave Evenden

Role: Visiting Research Fellow

Dave is a visiting research fellow at the University of Southampton. Previously Dave was a Chartered Engineer in contract R&D, working with high-tech communications systems and medical electronics for over 30 years. Embarking on a career change, he completed his PhD ‘Modelling the Future of Dementia Care in Wessex’ in 2018.

Working with colleagues, Dave is...