Caregiver Stress: Interventions to Promote Health and Wellbeing

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Program Project aims to promote health and reduce cardiovascular risk in family caregivers of persons with chronic illness. As family caregivers provide physical, psychosocial, and instrumental care to their loved ones with prolonged and progressive health conditions, they often experience tremendous burden while balancing other life demands. Chronic intense caregiving represents a situation of chronic stress, which takes a toll on health through a cascade of deleterious physiological stress processes. Along with caregivers' lack of attention to their own health promotion, risk of cardiovascular disease, in particular, is a major concern. Few studies have explored self-care interventions for family caregivers especially targeted to improve coping with the stressful circumstances and also to ameliorate the harmful effects of chronic stress ultimately associated with cardiovascular risk. In two studies, using a psychoneuroimmunological approach, we will test two interventions, psycho-education and physical exercise, individually and in combination. The first study will target family caregivers of African American dementia patients; the second will focus on family caregivers of heart failure patients. Parallel designs, interventions and measures will create synergy as will integration of all data management and analyses within a Biobehavioral Science and Measures Core. This Core will also provide high level guidance and interpretation of model testing resulting from analysis of the common data set. The combined data set will allow for elucidating the neuroendocrine mechanisms of stress-induced cardiovascular risk, further developing the model, and stimulating future research, while the shared core support will provide substantial efficiency; neither could be achieved outside of a Program Project approach. These collective efforts will generate important data whereby future care can significantly enhance the lives of family caregivers and minimize their risk of cardiovascular disease, the number one cause of disability and death in the United States.