THE PHYSICAL IMPACT
Imagine a job that had no vacations and no coffee breaks, a job where you worked alone most of the time and in which you worked twenty-four hours a day. Now imagine that the job gave you total and complete responsibility for the health, safety, and well-being of another person, someone you love and whose personality has morphed into someone you no longer recognize. It’s no wonder then, that caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s takes such a toll on the caregiver’s health.
According to the Alzheimer’s Association, the caregiver of an Alzheimer’s Disease patient has more health problems than other people at his age who are not providing care. The caregivers report 46 percent more physician visits, use 70 percent more prescription drugs, and are three times more likely to become clinically depressed than non-caregiving peers. And according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, caregivers between the ages of 66 and 96 had a risk of dying that is 63 percent higher than that of people the same age who were not caregivers.
Other studies on caregiver health are equally pessimistic:
• A study by researchers at the University of Alabama found that women involved in caregiving produced significantly more Cortisol than those who did not, even after other factors that impact Cortisol production were taken into account. Cortisol is a hormone released by the adrenal glands when a person is under stress.
• Researchers at the University of California in San Diego looked at fifty-four caregivers of spouses with Alzheimer’s and found that the negative impact of caregiving had a direct link to blood coagulation. The researchers concluded that the chronic stress of caregiving for a spouse with Alzheimer’s made caregivers vulnerable to excess blood clotting that could lead to heart attacks and other coronary problems.
• A meta-analysis of caregiver health published in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association, found that caregivers had weaker immune systems in addition to higher stress hormones. Levels of antibodies, which are a measure of the immune system’s capacity for defending against viruses, were fifteen percent lower in caregivers than they were in non caregivers. Caregivers also had twenty-three percent higher levels of stress hormones.
THE EMOTIONAL TOLL
Physical ailments are only part of the problem. Because Alzheimer’s progresses so slowly, the disease has frequently been called “the long good-bye.” And because the days are so long, caregiving for an Alzheimer’s patient has been dubbed the thirty-six hour day.
No one understands this better than the caregivers, who are at the forefront of the disease, watching a loved one become sicker and needier as Alzheimer’s robs them of their memories, cognitive functions, and eventually, their basic physical functioning. For them, die prolonged farewell is particularly painful and brutal, and frequendy produces a constellation of difficult emotions.