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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Mental health and morbidity of caregivers and co-residents of individuals with dementia
— a quasi-experimental design | | Author(s) | Aideen Maguire, Michael Rosato, Dermot O'Reilly |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 32, no 10, October 2017 |
| Publisher | Wiley, October 2017 |
| Pages | pp 1104-1113 |
| Source | http://www.orangejournal.org |
| Keywords | Dementia ; Informal care ; Family care ; Household and family composition ; Health [elderly] ; Mental health [elderly] ; Ill health ; Death ; At risk. |
| Annotation | The present study aimed to determine whether providing informal care to a co-resident with dementia symptoms places an additional risk on the likelihood of poor mental health or mortality compared with co-resident non-caregivers. A quasi-experimental design of caregiving and non-caregiving co-residents of individuals with dementia symptoms provided a natural comparator for the additive effects of caregiving on top of living with an individual with dementia symptoms. Census records, providing information on household structure, intensity of caregiving, presence of dementia symptoms and self-reported mental health were linked to mortality records over the following 33 months. Multi-level regression models were constructed to determine the risk of poor mental health and death in co-resident caregivers of individuals with dementia symptoms compared with co-resident non-caregivers, adjusting for the clustering of individuals within households. The cohort consisted of 10,982 co-residents (55.1% caregivers), with 12.1% of non-caregivers reporting poor mental health compared with 8.4% of intense caregivers providing 20 or more hours of care per week. During follow-up, the cohort experienced 560 deaths including 245 caregivers. Overall caregiving co-residents were at no greater risk of poor mental health but had lower mortality risk than non-caregiving co-residents. This lower mortality risk was also seen amongst the most intensive caregivers. These findings show that caregiving poses no additional risk to mental health over and above the risk associated with merely living with someone with dementia and is associated with a lower mortality risk compared with non-caregiving co-residents. (JL). |
| Accession Number | CPA-171027221 A |
| Classmark | EA: P6: P6:SJ: K7:SJ: CC: D: CH: CW: CA3 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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