Effectiveness of “Reducing Disability in Alzheimer’s Disease” among dyads with moderate dementia

Interventions such as Reducing Disability in Alzheimer’s Disease (RDAD) improve the health of care receiver-caregiver dyads but plans to implement it locally in regional community agencies yielded three changes: 1) reduced reliance on licensed clinicians, 2) centralized exercise interventionists and 3) more flexible delivery. We aimed to assess the effectiveness of the Kansas City RDAD implementation (RDAD-KC) among a non-probabilistic sample of dyads with moderate dementia, which addressed these changes. We hypothesized that dyads’ health would improve from baseline to the end-of-treatment. Outcomes improved (p<0.01) 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 minutes/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.