Predictors of mortality in atypical antipsychotic-treated community-dwelling elderly patients with behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia: a prospective population-based cohort study from Italy.

Purpose: To evaluate the effect of a broad range of covariates on the survival of a real-life long-term follow-up cohort of community-dwelling patients with behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia who were new users of atypical antipsychotic medications (APMs).

Methods: This was a prospective cohort study of 1,618 subjects aged ≥65 years with dementia and BPSD ("behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia") who were new users of atypical APMs and registered in a Dementia Evaluation Unit of Campania Region (Italy) from September 2006 to March 2010. The potential of baseline features to predict mortality was assessed with the Cox proportional hazards model.

Results: The average follow-up was 309 days. Of the 1,618 new users of atypical antipsychotics, 9.3 % experienced at least one adverse event, including death (5.1 %), drug therapeutic failure (3.0 %), extrapyramidal symptoms (0.5 %) and stroke (0.2 %). The crude all-cause mortality rate was 6.0 per 100 person-years [95 % confidence interval (CI) 4.8-7.4]; the rate was higher in patients aged >85 years (9.0 per 100 person-years, 95 % CI 6.4-12.7) and among male patients (7.5 per 100 person-years, 95% CI 5.3-10.6). In the multivariate analysis, only age was associated to all-cause mortality [hazard ratio (HR) 1.1; 95 % CI 1.0-1.1 and HR 1.4; 95 % CI: 0.9-2.2, respectively). In contrast, hallucination (HR 0.4; 95 % CI 0.2-0.6) and dosage change (HR 0.4; 95 % CI 0.2-0.78) were significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality.

Conclusions: Among our patient cohort, the mortality rate of patients with BPSD receiving long-term treatment with atypical APMs was lower than that reported in other studies, and only age was found to be significant predictor factor of mortality.