The Effect of Caregiver Burden on Healthy Lifestyle Behaviours of People Caring for Patients With Alzheimer's Disease: A Cross-Sectional Study.
Büşra Neva Tekin, Sıdıka Kaya, Nigar Esra Erkoç Ataoğlu and 1 others
PMID 42464060WHAT IT FOUND
Higher caregiver burden was linked to lower healthy lifestyle behaviours in caregivers of people with Alzheimer's disease.
Social burden was the clearest burden dimension linked to lower health habits. The study cannot show cause.
Key findings
01Caregiver burden and healthy lifestyle behaviours were moderately and negatively correlated (r = -0.40; p < 0.05).
02Higher caregiver burden was significantly associated with lower healthy lifestyle behaviour scores in regression (b = -0.32; p <= 0.001), and the association remained significant after control variables (b = -0.29; p < 0.05).
03In stepwise regression, social burden had a significant negative association with healthy lifestyle behaviours (b = -0.92; p < 0.05), developmental burden was borderline (b = -0.65; p = 0.053), and these two dimensions explained 19.3% of the variance.
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 point, so it cannot show that caregiver burden caused lower healthy lifestyle behaviours. It included only 84 caregivers from one university hospital dementia outpatient clinic in Türkiye, so the findings may not apply to rural areas or other healthcare systems. Caregivers were recruited by approaching relatives of eligible patients during a limited ethics-approved period, and convenience sampling was used instead of probability sampling. All key information came from caregiver self-report questionnaires and was not checked against medical records. The data were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, and lockdown measures may have influenced social burden scores.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest and reported nothing to disclose.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that reducing caregiver burden will improve healthy lifestyle behaviours. This was a single time-point survey of caregivers, so it shows an association, not that burden caused poorer habits or that any intervention would help.