Health and its determinants in the spousal caregivers of a dementia partner

The success of dementia care depends on the full support from the caregivers to achieve the goal of delaying the disease’s progress and maintaining functionality and dignity of individuals who are suffering from dementia. With the framework of Caregiver Health Model (CGHM), this project will employ mixed-methods strategies to determine health and its determinants, include caregiver health promotion activities, caregiver attitudes and beliefs, caregiver tasks and caregiver needs of spousal caregivers for dementia.

By convenient sampling, our team recruited 80 dyads and examined the relationships of socioeconomic, care recipient’s, and caregiver’s factors with spousal caregivers’ psychosocial adjustment. It was found that care recipients’ cognitive functions were associated with caregivers’ reported frequencies of their behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD), and caregivers’ perceived burden of caregiving. Upon further examining the CGHM with these parameters, a significant multivariate general linear model was found with (F (1, 12) = 13.06, p = .001, partial eta square = .70, observed power = .99).

Female caregivers reported higher sense of caregiving stress and poorer quality of life than male caregivers. This study found that the cognitive functions are strongly associated with degrees of psychosocial adjustment among their spousal caregivers. OT should have our insights to support in-home caregiving of people with dementia and develop strategies to empower spousal caregivers to execute their caregiving roles in order to prevent occupational deprivation and imbalance to to this group of caregivers.