BioMed Central

Background: Informal care is essential for many people with dementia (PwD), but it often results in a considerable burden for the caregiver. The perseverance time instrument integrates the aspect of perceived burden with the caregiver's capacity to cope with the burden, in contrast to most available instruments, which measure solely the burden of caregiving.

Background: This study aims to review the methodologies used to identify the needs, the existing needs assessment instruments and the main topics of needs explored among caregivers of patients with mild cognitive impairment to dementia.; Methods: MEDLINE, PsycINFO, The Cochrane Library and Web of science were searched from January 1980 to January 2017.

Background: Our ageing society is putting tremendous strain on public health and welfare programs to meet the needs of ageing individuals. Promoting informal caregiving is one way for policymakers to reduce this burden. However, caregiving may be experienced as stressful and is associated with adverse health consequences. While quite a lot of research focuses on caregiving for community-dwelling older adults, little is known about informal care in institutionalised long-term care (ILTC).

Objective: We examined whether caregivers' employment status (i.e., retired or employed) might modify the association between the behaviours of persons with Alzheimer's disease (PwAD) and caregivers' health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL). Data came from a cross-sectional study of the primary informal caregivers of 200 persons with mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease.

Background: There is limited evidence on caregiver outcomes associated with mild cognitive impairment in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD-MCI) and the coping strategies used by these caregivers. Methods: To investigate this relationship, we examined levels of burden, depression, anxiety, coping strategies and positive aspects of caregiving in the informal caregivers of 96 PD patients. The PD patients were classified using MDS-Task Force Level II criteria as showing either normal cognition (PD-N; n = 51), PD-MCI (n = 30) or with dementia (PDD; n = 15).

Background: While most studies focused solely on the comparison between informal caregivers and non-caregivers, little is known about the relation between caregiving time or caregiving activities and lifestyle factors.

Background: The unpaid care provided by informal caregivers allows care recipients to live longer in their homes, which often results in fewer unnecessary long term care home (LTCH) admissions. Although the relationship between care recipient's health characteristics and institutionalization is well known, the influence of caregiver distress and caregiving coresidence and relationship on this outcome is less clear.

Background: Individualized, outreach and structured multicomponent interventions are a promising intervention approach to relieve the burden of informal caregivers of people with dementia. In this study, we adapted and evaluated a multicomponent intervention (Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer's Caregiver Health II, REACH II), which was developed in the USA, to the German health-care system.

Background: Caring for people with dementia at home requires a significant amount of time, organization, and commitment. Therefore, informal caregivers, mainly relatives, of people with dementia often feel a high burden. Although on-site support groups are known to have positive effects on the subjective well-being (SWB) and perceived social support of informal caregivers, there are cases in which relatives have either no time or no opportunity to leave the person alone or in which there are no support groups nearby.

Background: It is the wish of both people with cognitive impairment and their informal caregivers for the impaired person to live at home for as long as possible. This is also in line with economic arguments about health. The existing structure of day-care services for the elderly can be used to achieve this. Due to the current lack of empirical evidence in this field, most day-care centres do not offer a scientifically evaluated, structured intervention, but instead offer a mixture of individual activities whose efficacy has not yet been established.