Psychophysiological Mediators of Caregiver Stress and Differential Cognitive Decline.

Abstract

The authors examined relationships between chronic stress and cognitive decline and whether such relationships were mediated by psychophysiological factors. Ninety-six caregivers of spouses with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were compared with 95 similar noncaregiver spouses. All were free of diabetes. Although the groups started similarly, over 2 years caregivers declined by a small but significant amount (1 raw score point and 4 percentile points, each p<.05) on Shipley Vocabulary. In contrast, noncaregivers did not change. Higher hostile attribution (beta=-.09; p<.05) and metabolic risk (beta=-.10; p<.05) in caregivers mediated the cognitive decline. This is the first study of cognitive decline and mediators in caregivers. This work has implications for caregiver and care-recipient health and for research on cognition, psychophysiology, diabetes, and AD.

Memory failures for everyday tasks in caregivers of children with autism

“…Deficits in cognitive processes such as complex attention (Caswell et al, 2003) and speed of information processing (de Vugt et al, 2005) have also been observed in caregivers, and relative to normative controls, caregivers have also been shown to be impaired on tests of global cognitive functioning (Lee, Kawachi, & Grodstein, 2004). In addition, using a longitudinal design, Vitaliano et al (2005) demonstrated that cognitive decline across a two year period was markedly accelerated in spousal caregivers of dementia patients. However, not all caregivers are equally affected, and research has indicated that caregivers' cognitive well being might vary according to psychological factors such as distress and burden.…”

Nursing Students' Intentions to Work in Dementia Care: Influence of Age, Ageism, and Perceived Barriers

“…They also experience worse health outcomes, including obesity, higher metabolic risk (293), higher levels of stress hormones, compromised immune response, antibodies, greater medication use and greater cognitive decline (293,294).…”

Mechanisms of Stress in Humans

“…Numerous studies have linked chronic stress to several health problems (e.g., Moffitt, 2013), including Parkinson's disease (in animal studies, e.g., Djamshidian & Lees, 2014;Sugama, et al, 2016), depression (e.g., Conway, Rutter & Brown, 2016;Gold, 2015;Swanson, Zeng, Weeks, & Colman, 2013) and pain (e.g., Hannibal & Bishop, 2014;Vachon-Presseau, 2013, Woda, Picard, & Dutheil, 2016. Stress was found to be associated with diminishing capacity to respond to reward (Admon, et al, 2013), declines in cognitive function (Vitaliano, et al, 2005) and disruptions in attentional control of the prefrontal cortex functions (Liston et al, 2009). Stress also plays a role in memory process as manifested by changes in the hippocampus; specifically, stress levels were found to be positively associated with hippocampal volume loss (e.g., Brown et al, 2015;Gerritsenet al, 2015;Head et al, 2012).…”