It may be a tiring task and heavy responsibility for family caregivers to take care of a disabled family member, but it will surely be worth it as a new study suggests that they can have longer lives than others.
David L. Roth, lead author of the study and a director of the Johns Hopkins University Center on Aging and Health, and her colleagues analyzed data from the national Reasons for Geographic and racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) Study of African American and white adults aged 45 years and older between 2003 and 201. They found that those who take care of their family members have lower death rate compared to those who don't.
Their findings stunned them as there were earlier studies telling the opposite. Earlier studies linked poor mental and physical health of family caregivers to their heavy responsibilities. Taking care of a disabled family member or a spouse contributes major stress for the caregiver.
"(We want to) emphasize the positive message that caregiving is a healthy thing that we should be doing in our families," Roth told Reuters Health.
Roth clarified that they do acknowledge that caregivers have poor mental and physical health especially if they are taking care of people with dementia. However, she added that the earlier studies have "exaggerated" it.
The researchers looked at the records of 3,503 caregivers. They found that 80 percent of them are suffering from either mental or emotional stress due to their responsibilities, however these are just moderate. Only 578 or five percent are considered highly stressed.
Two thirds of the caregivers were women while one-third were adult children. Twenty percent takes care of their spouses. Most of them spend at least 14 hours in average of care giving.
The researchers also examined the death rate of the caregivers in which they found it 18 percent lower than non-caregivers. Only 7.5 percent of them died compared to nine percent of the non-caregivers.
The study was published in the online journal American Journal of Epidemiology.
