ArticleFamily practice2025
Family physician and specialist care for persons with dementia living in the community: through thick and thin.
Article in Family practice, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
23 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundPersons with dementia living in the community are vulnerable to service disruptions as they rely on a mix of outpatient care from different types of physicians. To demonstrate how outpatient physician visits evolved among persons with dementia during a health crisis compared to the prior year.
methodsUsing administrative databases, two retrospective cohorts (2019/pre-COVID-19 pandemic; 2020/pandemic) of community-dwelling persons with dementia aged 65+ were identified within three Canadian provinces (Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec). We measured the rates of visits (total/virtual/in-person) to family physicians, cognitive specialists (neurologists, geriatricians, and psychiatrists), and other specialists. Provincial incident rate ratios (IRR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated by comparing three pandemic periods (first wave; interim period; second wave) to the corresponding pre-pandemic periods (reference) and subsequently pooled using a meta-analysis to obtain overall estimates.
resultsPre-pandemic (n = 160 288) and pandemic (n = 166 392) cohorts had similar characteristics. Although significant increases in family physician visits within provinces were observed during certain periods, there was no significant change in overall estimates compared to pre-pandemic levels. Overall cognitive (IRR 0.85, CI 0.80-0.90) and other specialist (IRR 0.71, 0.56-0.90) visits were significantly lower in the first wave compared to pre-pandemic period. There was a significant increase in virtual visits and a significant decline in in-person visits across all physician types throughout the pandemic periods.
conclusionFamily physicians are the cornerstone of sustaining dementia care during health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, in part due to virtual care. Future research may investigate long-term outcomes of abrupt disruption in specialist and other community care.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.