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Three diseases, leading killers of Americans, often involve long periods of decline before death. Two of them — heart disease and cancer — usually require expensive drugs, surgeries and hospitalizations. The third, dementia, has no effective treatments to slow its course. (Kolata, 10/26)

Care in the last five years of life costs much more for patients with dementia than for those who die of heart disease, cancer, or other causes, a new study shows. In addition to costing more across the board, out-of-pocket spending for patients with dementia is 81 percent higher than for people with other diseases. according to the study, conducted by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Dartmouth College and University of California, Los Angeles and funded by the National Institute on Aging. (Bahrampour, 10/26)

Families may spend almost twice as much caring for dementia patients at the end of life than they might if their loved one suffered from a different disease, a U.S. study suggests. Costs paid by Medicare, the U.S. health insurance program for the elderly, were similar over the final five years of life for patients with dementia, heart disease, cancer and other conditions, according to the study published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine. (Rapaport, 10/26)