Caregiving can take a toll on health: study

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New research in healthy, older adults confirms that caregiving can take a toll on health.

"It's really important for caregivers and for clinicians who take care of caregivers, and also care recipients, to try to encourage caregivers to try to maintain their health and reduce stress as much as possible," Dr. Lisa Fredman of the Boston University School of Public Health, told Reuters Health.

While research has shown that people who care for an elderly or disabled loved one are more stressed than their peers without such responsibilities, evidence on the health effects of caregiving has been mixed, Fredman and her colleagues note in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

They hypothesized that caregivers might be more physically active than non-caregivers, which could help them stay healthy despite stress. To test this hypothesis, the researchers looked at 3,075 men and women who were in their 70s and participating in The Health, Aging and Body Composition Study. All participants were healthy at the study's outset, and 680, or 22.1 percent, were caring for a child or a disabled or ill adult.

After eight years, 20.6 percent of the caregivers had died, compared to 22 percent of non-caregivers. Roughly half of people in both groups had developed limitations in their mobility. While white caregivers were at 50 percent increased risk of death or mobility limitation, no increased risk was seen among black women.

Even after the researchers accounted for the physical activity expended taking care of someone, the caregivers remained more active than their non-caregiving counterparts. Caregivers who provided care for 24 or more hours a week had a greater likelihood of decline, which was reduced when the researchers adjusted for how physically active they were.

Fredman said she is hesitant to speculate on the racial difference in caregiving's health effects that she and her colleagues identified, given certain limitations of the data; for example, they were not able to determine if people were caring for a healthy or a disabled child, or perhaps a grandchild or great grandchild. "We didn't have a lot of data in this study to actually delve deeply into different aspects of caregiving, including how stressful it was, so future studies should do that."

She offered this advice for caregivers: "They should be doing as much as they can in terms of health promotion and stress reduction because some of these results, the ones in white men and women in particular, are consistent with studies found that caregiving had adverse effects on physical health."

SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, October 27, 2008.