Developing and evaluating community based intervention programs for Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers.

Innovative community based social and behavioral interventions for individuals suffering from Alzheimer's disease and their family caregivers have increased substantially in creativity and recognition over the years. However, the commitment to the scientific design and evaluations of these programs has not followed suit. The goal of this paper is to explicate the benefits of a systematic approach to the design and evaluation of intervention programs with the challenges of the Alzheimer's dyad in mind. Because of the unique nature of the disease, Alzheimer's programs must flexibly apply existing intervention and evaluation techniques to program designs which accommodate the degenerative course of the disease and the unique strain experienced by family caregivers. Using existing literature as a vehicle to illustrate how successful and unsuccessful programs have addressed these goals, the paper stresses the need for design and evaluations which apply creative and robust treatments, but do not compromise scientific rigor.