Impact of Caregiving
- Elderly spousal caregivers with a history of chronic illness
themselves who are experiencing caregiving related stress have a
63% higher mortality rate than their non-caregiving peers.
Source: Schulz, R. and Beach, S. R., Caregiving as a Risk Factor for Mortality: The Caregiver Health Effects Study. Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 282, No. 23, December 15, 1999.
- Stress of family caregiving for persons with dementia has
been shown to impact a person’s immune system for up to
three years after their caregiving ends thus increasing their
chances of developing a chronic illness themselves.
Source: Drs. Janice-Kiecolt Glaser and Ronald Glaser, “Chronic stress and age-related increases in the proinflammatory cytokine IL-6.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 30, 2003.
- Family caregivers who provide care 36 or more hours weekly
are more likely than non-caregivers to experience symptoms of
depression or anxiety. For spouses the rate is six times higher;
for those caring for a parent the rate is twice as high.
Source: Cannuscio, C.C., C. Jones, I. Kawachi, G.A. Colditz, L. Berkman and E. Rimm, Reverberation of family illness: A longitudinal assessment of informal caregiver and mental health status in the nurses’ health study. American Journal of Public Health 92:305-1311, 2002.
- A wife's hospitalization increased her husband's chances of
dying within a month by 35%. A husband's hospitalization boosted
his wife's mortality risk by 44%.
Source: Nicholas D. Christakis, Professor, Health-care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston and Suzanne Salamon, M.D., Associate Chief, Geriatric Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, Boston, New England Journal of Medicine, Feb. 16, 2006.
- Family caregivers experiencing extreme stress have been shown
to age prematurely. This level of stress can take as much as 10
years off a family caregiver’s life.
Source: Arno, Peter S., "Economic Value of Informal Caregiving," presented at the Care Coordination and the Caregiving Forum, Dept. of Veterans Affairs, NIH, Bethesda, MD, January 25-27, 2006.
- Family caregivers report having a chronic condition at more
than twice the rate of non-caregivers.
Source: Health and Human Services, Informal Caregiving: Compassion in Action. Washington, DC: Department of Health and Human Services. Based on data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), 1998 and 1 National Family Caregivers Association, Random Sample Survey of Family Caregivers, Summer 2000, Unpublished and National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, Caregiving in the U.S., 2004.
Reprinted from Statistics on Family Caregivers and Family Caregiving 2006 with permission of the National Family Caregivers Association, Kensington, MD, the nation’s only organization for all family caregivers.
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