Development of Regional Disparities in Alzheimer’s Disease Mortality in the Slovak Republic from 1996 to 2015

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease—subsequently as AD in the text—represents a chronic neurodegenerative disease discussed very often in the recent period. It involves the G30 diagnosis expressing exactly AD and also the F00 diagnosis epitomising dementia in AD. The Slovak Republic has a very various population in terms of the disparities of the population localisation. The analysis is executed on the basement of the standardised mortality rate. It is calculated for the individual districts of the Slovak Republic to get a detailed spatial view and for each year of the explored period from 1996 to 2015 to get a time development. It has a considerably rising tendency. Therefore, the regional disparities of the standardised mortality rate of AD are analysed from an angle of view of its similarity, by its measurement in a form of a Euclidean distance approach. The results of the analysis offer the heat maps as the distance matrices in a graphic form and the maps of the individual districts too. These outputs reveal a very heterogeneous structure of the standardised mortality rate. Another graphic outcome demonstrates a distribution of its values among the districts throughout the whole Slovak Republic for the whole observed period. The results offer a comparison among the districts of the Slovak Republic too. The highest values and also the lowest values are reached in the different districts for the both sexes. Even, one district reaches the opposite result for the individual sexes. The age structure of the deceased population on the G30 diagnosis is also executed and the extreme values from an angle of a view of the districts are picked up. There are evident high differentiations between the individual districts of the Slovak Republic. The conclusion section involves the several key points and the potential suggestions for further research.

The role of geographic information system and global positioning system in dementia care and research: a scoping review

“…The studies in this category focused on any visualization for dementia-related outcomes. Most maps were applied to visualize the spatial and temporal patterns of dementia/Alzheimer's mortality [49,50,55,[68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78]] and hospital admission rates [79]. Some visualized spatial distribution of birthplace of dementia patients [80,81], the area with high concentration [82], incidents of missing patients with dementia [83], dementia risk/rate [4,12,57,[84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93], hospice use [94], opioid use [95], and antipsychotic drug use [15].…”