Caregiver Depression Increases Health Care Use by Individuals With Dementia

Caregiver depression increases emergency department use and subsequent hospitalization among patients with dementia. There could be further demands of financial strain and functional dependence. This is a modifiable problem, and if addressed, improves health care outcomes and reduces costs among individual with dementia.

An observational study of 663 caregivers and the patients with dementia they care for suggests caregiver depression is associated with increased emergency department visits for their patients.

Caregivers

The society needs to empathize with the person taking on the duty of caregiver. Caregiver can be a woman who is a wife, mother, teacher, homemaker a doting husband, a father teacher, a nurse or a therapist.

‘Emergency department use and further hospitalization increase among individuals with dementia due to caregiver depression. If the depression is taken care of, it results in reduced costs and increased health care outcomes.’
Read More..

A total of 84 caregivers had depression at the study start and it was associated with an increase in rates of emergency department use by patients after accounting for a number of other potential mitigating factors including patient age and the severity of dementia.

There were 196 patients with dementia who had at least one emergency department visit in the first six months of the study. Caregiver depression was associated with an additional 0.7 emergency department visits per person-year for patients compared to caregivers without depression (1.5 vs. 0.8 visits) on an absolute scale.

What Caregivers Face While Taking Care of Loved Ones With Alzheimer’s or Dementia

Lack of well-trained attenders and counseling are two of the biggest challenges faced by families, who are caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's and Dementia.

Limitations of the study to consider include selection bias because those caregivers with higher depression may have declined to participate.

Other factors may also influence the results, including socioeconomic status.

Still, the results reveal an important potential caregiver vulnerability that if overlooked in clinical encounters could neglect an important component of care and limit the ability to maximize patient outcomes.

Source: Eurekalert