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Virginia Richardson, College of Social Work

Posted on | November 18, 2009 | 2,508 views |

How does caregiving affect a person’s health?
Caregiving is an increasingly important issue as people live longer and die from chronic illnesses more often than in the past. Although there are many gifts that come from caring for a loved one who is ill, spousal caregivers also confront many challenges. Caregiving is especially stressful when loved ones suffer from Alzheimer’s disease or some other protracted illness. Some caregivers develop adverse psychological and physiological effects especially if their caregiving is protracted, they become socially isolated, they have limited family supports or they care for spouses who suffer before dying. Some spousal caregivers develop complicated grief reactions that affect their well-being and immune systems and increase their likelihood of illness, depression and hospitalization.

I am currently working with several other researchers to test a new model of bereavement, the Dual Process Model of Bereavement, that Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands proposed 10 years ago. The first empirical findings will be reported in a special issue of Omega: Journal of Death and Dying in 2010.

And during the November 2009 meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, a group of us will present our findings about the physiological stress effects of caregiving during bereavement. We use longitudinal data from the Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC) study that was collected by the University of Michigan. These data include interviews with more than 1,000 older couples, which were conducted once before bereavement and six months, 18 months and 48 months after bereavement, and urine and blood samples taken before and after bereavement. We found that spouses who were involved in long-term caregiving had higher levels of cortisol and other stress hormones 18 months after bereavement than spouses who were not caregivers. We found that levels of stress hormones were significantly higher among bereaved spouses than among a control of similarly matched older married persons. Although others have found that caregiving can cause adverse stress reactions, these data show that the stress reactions are strongest for those whose spouses died long, protracted deaths and presumably required extensive caregiving.

What’s being done to help these caregivers?
In future research by an inter-university partnership between researchers from OSU’s College of Social Work, including assistant professors Holly Dabelko-Schoeny and Keith Anderson, and Miami University’s Scripps Gerontology Center, we plan to identify and evaluate the community services and other supports that most effectively reduce caregivers’ stress and prevent complicated grief reactions during bereavement. If we can strengthen the effective supports and determine evidenced-based interventions, we may be able to reduce complicated grief reactions among those at greatest risk. Early intervention during the most stressful times of caregiving should enhance bereaved spousal caregivers’ well-being, strengthen their immune systems and prevent them from becoming ill, ultimately reducing their need for medical care and health care costs. However, this requires a longitudinal research design that allows us to monitor participants for many years.

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