Older Adults With Cardiovascular Disease and Their Care Partners: An Analysis of Care Needs, Care Activities, and Care Partner Stress and Mental Health.
Julie T Bidwell, Alex J Fauer, Rebecca J Howe and 5 others
PMID 40148260WHAT IT FOUND
Older adults with cardiovascular disease often need help with mobility, self-care, medications, and medical visits.
Their unpaid care partners do many tasks and report stress, pain, and anxiety or depression symptoms. Ask who is helping, but this study did not test whether that changes outcomes.
Key findings
01Older adults with a history of cardiovascular disease were significantly more likely to report needing help with mobility, bathing or toileting, dressing, and picking up and tracking medications.
02Care partners of older adults with cardiovascular disease commonly helped with daily living tasks, medication and diet management, appointments, provider discussions, care coordination, and hospital-to-home transitions, while few reported caregiving training or used respite.
03Care partner stress was associated with poorer care partner health, lower relationship quality, and helping with personal care or mobility, care coordination, and medical/nursing tasks, while care partner anxiety or depression was associated with education level, the older adult's anxiety or depression symptoms, and relationship quality.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study measured everything at one time point, so it cannot show that care tasks caused stress or that stress caused care tasks. It combined different cardiovascular conditions into one history of cardiovascular disease, so it cannot say what specific heart problems need. It did not account for regional differences in health and access to care. Care partner anxiety and depression were measured with brief screening questions, not clinical diagnoses. Over half of care partners did not report interactions with the older adult's care team, so health-system factors were limited.
Declared interests
The authors reported no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the links between care tasks and stress as proof that the tasks caused stress. The data were collected at one time point, so the direction of association is unknown.