3/20/98
CONTACT: At Stanford, M.A. Malone or Mike Goodkind, (650) 723- 6911. At the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans, William Glitz, (504) 561- 1234.
EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE at 8:30 a.m. U.S. Central Time on Thursday, March 26, to correspond with presentation at the annual meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine. The meeting is being held March 25 through 29 at the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans. The press room number is (504) 561-1234.
ELDER CARE: MORE HEART-RENDING FOR DAUGHTERS THAN FOR WIVES?
STANFORD -- Daughters serving as the primary caregivers for an ailing parent show more cardiovascular stress than do wives caring for their ailing husbands, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Compared with wives, daughters caring for a relative with dementia in their own homes experienced measurably greater increases in heart rate and blood pressure during interactions with the ailing relative, the researchers found. No such differences between wives and daughters turned up during moments when the relative was absent.
'This is the first evidence of differential physiologic effects of caregiving in the natural environment for daughters versus wives,' said the study's principal investigator, Abby King, an assistant professor of health research and policy with the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention.
'Our data suggest that from a physical health standpoint, daughters are a very important group to look at, and they may in fact be facing more difficult challenges that translate into actual effects on their cardiovascular system,' King said.
She speculated that daughters may carry a heavier burden as caregivers because they tend to be younger, with independent lives, and may not have bargained for life as a caretaker.
'In general, it may be more of an imposition for a younger person who hasn't planned or bargained for that, as opposed to a wife, who has chosen to marry someone and may be more accepting of that person's illness,' King said.
King is scheduled to present the new findings Thursday, March 26, at the annual meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, held in New Orleans.
Her study is part of a larger, NIH-sponsored research project at Stanford aimed at improving the health of older caregivers, whose numbers will grow in the next century as the population ages. In the United States today, about 75 percent of older caregivers are women, said King, who described them as 'the life net between their loved ones and institutionalization.'
The study, conducted in 1997, involved 81 women between the ages of 50 and 85 who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each woman was caring at home for a parent or spouse with dementia resulting from Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease or stroke. Some 57 percent of the women were wives caring for husbands. The rest were daughters looking after a mother or father.
Whereas other studies have examined the psychological stress of caregiving, the Stanford study focused on how caregivers respond physically to the demands of their role, said King.
The volunteers first underwent a laboratory treadmill test in which researchers measured their heart rate and blood pressure level. Wives and daughters did not differ from each other on this test, King said.
The researchers then asked the women to come back another day to talk about the negative aspects of their caregiving experiences in a laboratory setting while their blood pressure and heart rate were monitored. During this test, both wives and daughters showed increases in blood pressure, but the rise was greater in the wives. 'Just talking about their experiences was a little more stressful physiologically for the wives than for the daughters,' King said.
More important, however, were the measurements of physiological stress taken at home, she said.
The researchers asked each woman to carry a Walkman-sized device that measures blood pressure and heart rate every hour during the course of a normal day. At the same time, each woman kept an hourly computer record of where she was and what she was doing as she went about her routine activities.
During interactions with the ailing relative, the daughters' heart rates and blood pressure levels rose significantly more than those of the wives, the data revealed. Those measurements echoed the women's own reports of psychological stress during such encounters.
In the computer logs, 'daughters recorded significantly more distress in interpersonal interactions. They reported having more difficulty relating to their care recipient -- their father or mother -- than did the wives, and those reports were linked to increases in blood pressure and heart rate responses,' King said.
All of the women in the study now are enrolled in a one-year, supervised program in which they either follow a specified exercise routine or adopt heart-healthful eating habits. 'In addition to looking at how their blood pressure responses relate to their caregiving experiences, we're interested in seeing how these interventions might have a positive impact on their health,' King said.
Her colleagues on the study are research assistant Kellie Baumann, postdoctoral fellow Sara Wilcox, recruitment coordinator Paula O'Sullivan and research assistant Patrick Henderson.
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