BackgroundThere has been a substantial number of systematic reviews of stress, coping and interventions for people with dementia and their caregivers. This paper provides a meta-review of this literature 1988-2014.MethodA meta-review was carried out of systematic reviews of stress, coping and interventions for people with dementia and their caregivers, using SCOPUS, Google Scholar and CINAHL Plus databases and manual searches.ResultsThe meta-review identified 45 systematic reviews, of which 15 were meta-analyses. Thirty one reviews addressed the effects of interventions and 14 addressed the results of correlational studies of factors associated with stress and coping. Of the 31 systematic reviews dealing with intervention studies, 22 focused on caregivers, 6 focused on people with dementia and 3 addressed both groups. Overall, benefits in terms of psychological measures of mental health and depression were generally found for the use of problem focused coping strategies and acceptance and social-emotional support coping strategies. Poor outcomes were associated with wishful thinking, denial, and avoidance coping strategies. The interventions addressed in the systematic reviews were extremely varied and encompassed Psychosocial, Psychoeducational, Technical, Therapy, Support Groups and Multicomponent interventions. Specific outcome measures used in the primary sources covered by the systematic reviews were also extremely varied but could be grouped into three dimensions, viz., a broad dimension of “Psychological Well-Being v. Psychological Morbidity” and two narrower dimensions of “Knowledge and Coping” and of “Institutionalisation Delay”.ConclusionsThis meta-review supports the conclusion that being a caregiver for people with dementia is associated with psychological stress and physical ill-health. Benefits in terms of mental health and depression were generally found for caregiver coping strategies involving problem focus, acceptance and social-emotional support. Negative outcomes for caregivers were associated with wishful thinking, denial and avoidance coping strategies. Psychosocial and Psychoeducational interventions were beneficial for caregivers and for people with dementia. Support groups, Multicomponent interventions and Joint Engagements by both caregivers and people with dementia were generally found to be beneficial. It was notable that virtually all reviews addressed very general coping strategies for stress broadly considered, rather than in terms of specific remedies for specific sources of stress. Investigation of specific stressors and remedies would seem to be a useful area for future research.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12877-016-0280-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This paper reports four experiments on the effects of word age of acquisition in verbal tasks. In all cases, multiple-regression analysis was used to assess the relative effects of age as opposed to other potentially relevant word attributes. Experiments 1 and 2 concemed lexical memory tasks. In Experiment 1, picture naming speeds were found to be mainly determined by picture codability and name age of acquisition. In Experiment 2, it was found that when subjects produced words in response to bigram cues, early acquired target words were more likely to be produced than later acquired words, even when frequency and other word attributes were taken into account. The remaining two experiments dealt with the episodie memory tasks of free recall and recognition. No age effects were found in these tasks. It was concluded that early age of acquisition facilitates retrieval from lexical memory but has no significant effect in episodie memory tasks.This paper concerns the effects of word age of acquisition in lexical and episodic memory tasks. The first two experiments reported here involve retrieval from lexical memory in response to pictorial and letter cues, respectively. The remaining two experiments deal with the episodic memory tasks of free recall and recognition memory. Before detailing these experiments, we briefly review previous work on age-of-acquisition effects.In one of the first studies in this area, Carroll and White (1973) found that the rated age of acquisition of picture names was a major determinant of picture naming latency, (H may be noted that the age ratings were highly reliable and correlated well with objective indices of age of acquisition.) In Carroll and White's study, early acquired names were generally produced faster than later acquired names. Further, this effect was not due to the correlation between age and frequency of usage, since age still had a significant correlation with picture naming speed when the effects of name frequency were partialled from age, while the correlation of frequency with speed dwindled to nonsignificance when age was partialled from frequency. This result was of potentially far reaching importance, since it suggested that the many word frequency effects reported in memory, learning, and perception research might be entirely due to the underlying, and hitherto largely unnoticed, variable of age of acquisition. However, subsequent studies (Lachman, 1973; Lachman, Schaffer, Experiments 1, 3, and 4 were earried out with the assistanee of (United Kingdom) SSRC Grant HR 5318/1. Thanks are due to Martin Cooper for the graphie work in Experiment 1. Requests for reprints should be addressed to K. 1. Gilhooly , Psyehology Department, Aberdeen University, Aberdeen, Scotland AB9 2UB, U.K. & Hennrikus, 1974) found that both age and frequency can independently affect picture naming latency.The experiments of Lachman and his co-workers are notable for the control exercised over the stimulus "codability" variable, a variable that Carroll and White (1973) did not include in th...

The aim of this paper is to present findings concerning a variety of factors expected to influence, either directly or indirectly as mediators, the psychological well-being of persons caring for a dementing relative in the community. The sample included both co-resident and non-resident supporters and the data were collected via a semi-structured interview. Only sex of dependant, sex of supporter, satisfaction with help from relatives, blood/role relationship, duration of care, frequency of visits from a home help and community nurse were significantly correlated with supporters' morale and mental health. The directions of these correlations were, however, not always as expected, e.g. the longer the duration of care-giving the higher the supporters' morale and the better the supporters' mental health. It was interesting to find that level of impairment and help from family and friends were not significantly associated with morale and mental health of supporters.

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