Systematic review of information and support interventions for caregivers of people with dementia

Abstract

BackgroundDementia is an important health and social care problem and is one of the main causes of disability in later life. The number of families affected by dementia will dramatically increase over the next five decades. Despite the implications for health and social care services in the future, the overwhelming majority of care for people with dementia takes place away from health care settings. Providing informal care for someone with dementia can be psychologically, physically and financially expensive and a range of health service interventions aimed at supporting and providing information to these carers has developed to help carers meet these demands. This review examines whether information and support interventions improve the quality of life of people caring for someone with dementia.MethodsA systematic review examining evidence from randomised controlled trials in which technology, individualised or group-based interventions built around the provision of support and/or information were evaluated.ResultsForty-four studies were included in the review. Controlling for the quality of the evidence, we found statistically significant evidence that group-based supportive interventions impact positively on psychological morbidity. However, whilst the improvement was unlikely to be due to chance, the clinical significance of this finding should be interpreted tentatively, due to the difficulties in interpreting the standardised mean difference as a measure of effect and the complex aetiology of depression. No evidence was found for the effectiveness of any other form of intervention on a range of physical and psychological health outcomes.ConclusionThere is little evidence that interventions aimed at supporting and/or providing information to carers of people with dementia are uniformly effective. There is a pressing need to ensure that supportive interventions at the development stage are accompanied by good quality randomised evaluations in which outcomes that are important to clinicians and carers are measured.

Effectiveness of educational programs on reducing the burden of caregivers of elderly individuals with dementia: a systematic review

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Caring for Mom and Neglecting Yourself? The Health Effects of Caring for an Elderly Parent

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Counselling for dementia caregivers—predictors for utilization and expected quality from a family caregiver’s point of view

“…Second: How can support for the family caregivers be optimized? Which factors influence the decision whether support offers (Gallagher- Thompson and Coon 2007;Pinquart and Sörensen 2006;Thompson et al 2007)-assuming areawide availability-are actually utilized or not? This study deals with the second question particularly regarding caregiver counselling.…”