Caregiver Intervention for Caregivers of SCI Patients

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall objective of the proposed project is to test the efficacy of an innovative multi-component psychosocial/technology intervention aimed at reducing the risk for adverse health outcomes among family caregivers of older survivors with spinal cord injury, and to improve the well being of the spinal cord injured survivor. For the caregiver, risk is characterized, as a multivariate construct comprised of five indicators: depressive symptoms, burden, self-care, social support, and health symptoms. The same risk construct applies to the SCI care recipient with the exception of the burden measure. The study design is a multi-site, three-group, randomized clinical trial comparing two active intervention conditions with each other and to an information-only control group. Caregiver and survivor dyads will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a caregiver-only intervention (single target) in which caregivers receive a multi- component intervention based on their risk profile: a caregiver plus care-recipient intervention (dual target) in which the caregiver intervention is complemented by a treatment targeting the SCI survivor, designed to address care recipient risk factors; and an information-only control condition in which the caregiver receives standard information about caregiving, SCI , and aging typically available from social service and health agencies. The benefits of treatment, measured in terms of a multivariate outcome comprised of depressive symptoms, self-care, health symptoms, social support, and burden (caregiver only) for both the caregiver and care recipient should be greater in the dual treatment approach when compared to the caregiver-only condition. The caregiver-only condition should be superior to the information-only control condition with respect to caregiver outcomes, but not necessarily for care recipient outcomes. The analytic plan will enable us to assess causal links between treatment components and specific outcomes as well as explore cultural and racial variations in treatment effectiveness.