Middle aged people

The study aims to give an understanding of the perspectives of younger people with dementia and their carers and to make recommendations on future service delivery, policy development and practice. The report begins with an extensive literature review, followed by details of the study methodology. In-depth interviews with six sufferers and six carers were undertaken. The findings are reported with liberal use of quotations from the study participants to ensure the voice of sufferers and carers is heard. Sufferers' perceptions of their world are given prominence.

Men and women in Great Britain are increasingly involved in a variety of economic and social roles, particularly during their mid-life period. This article examines the changes in role occupancy across four birth cohorts passing through mid-life over the period 1985-2000. Data from the General Household Survey is used to investigate the occupancy of four key roles: 'partner', 'parent', 'carer' and 'paid worker', analysing separate and multiple role occupancies and level of commitment to a particular role.

Importance  Caregiver burden may result from providing care for patients with chronic illness. It can occur in any of the 43.5 million individuals providing support to midlife and older adults. Caregiver burden is frequently overlooked by clinicians.

Objectives  To outline the epidemiology of caregiver burden; to provide strategies to diagnose, assess, and intervene for caregiver burden in clinical practice; and to evaluate evidence on interventions intended to avert or mitigate caregiver burden and related caregiver distress.

This review focuses upon women aged 45-60: an under-researched subgroup of the adult female population. Women in mid-life occupy a unique position in the lifespan at the intersection of a number of age-related and lifelong pathways. The lives of these women can be distinguished from those of both older and younger women along a number of important dimensions including their family and working lives, economic situation, general health, and the complexity of their roles both inside and outside the home.

This article investigates care provided to parents and parents-in-law by mid-life adults with dependent children at home. Data from the General Household Survey are used first to estimate the prevalence of this 'two-way' care over the past decade, and second to develop forecasts of two-way care for a generation of women who have just finished their childbearing years. Having a higher education qualification is associated with later ages both of caring for parents and of having children at home.

In this paper, we examine associations between employment history and marital status and unpaid care provision among those aged 40–59 in England and Wales. We used data from a large nationally representative longitudinal study, the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study. Initially based on a sample drawn from the 1971 Census, in 2001 this study included data on 110 464 people aged 40–59 of whom 5% provided 20 or more hours per week of unpaid care.

This paper uses work and caring history information from the British Family and Working Lives Survey (1994/5) to examine the provision of family care and its impact upon the employment and the subsequent state and private pension entitlement among mid-life men and women. Combining paid employment with care-giving was not an option for a significant minority of women with caring responsibilities in mid-life.