Sociodemographic aspects and health care-related outcomes: a latent class analysis of informal dementia care dyads

Background: Studies revealed the importance to assess dementia care dyads, composed of persons with dementia and their primary informal caregivers, in a differentiated way and to tailor support services to particular living and care circumstances. Therefore, this study aims first to identify classes of dementia care dyads that differ according to sociodemographic, care-related and dementia-specific characteristics and second, to compare these classes with regard to healthcare-related outcomes. Methods: We used data from the cross-sectional German DemNet-D study (n = 551) and conducted a latent class analysis to investigate different classes of dementia care dyads. In addition, we compared these classes with regard to the use of health care services, caregiver burden (BIZA-D), general health of the informal caregiver (EQ-VAS) as well as quality of life (QoL-AD) and social participation (SACA) of the person with dementia. Furthermore, we compared the stability of the home-based care arrangements. Results: Six different classes of dementia care dyads were identified, based on best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), significant likelihood ratio test (p < 0.001), high entropy (0.87) and substantive interpretability. Classes were labelled as “adult child parent relationship & younger informal caregiver”, “adult child parent relationship & middle aged informal caregiver”, “non family relationship & younger informal caregiver”, “couple & male informal caregiver of older age”, “couple & female informal caregiver of older age”, “couple & younger informal caregiver”. The classes showed significant differences regarding health care service use. Caregiver burden, quality of life of the person with dementia and stability of the care arrangement differed also significantly between the classes. Conclusion: Based on a latent class analysis this study indicates differences between classes of informal dementia care dyads. The findings may give direction for better tailoring of support services to particular circumstances to improve healthcare-related outcomes of persons with dementia and informal caregivers.