The Alzheimer’s impact on caregivers
In cases where the caretaker is a woman, she is usually the wife in almost 20% in charge of taking care of her spouse and in a greater proportion we find the daughter, representing 43.2% while, if they are men,In most cases the husband is responsible.
In addition, caregivers usually have a low level of training in more than 60% of caregiver with incomplete primary or high school, while a small percentage have technical or professional training. Regarding the training they have received to provide care, it should be said that only 17.7% of caregivers had such training.
Another important factor is the employment situation in which these caregivers are found, since in 27% in addition to taking care of the dependent person are active work, while around 12% they are forced to leave their job to dedicateyour time to care.
The caregivers are forced to be constantly attending to the dependent person, being able to cause him the so -called career of the caregiver, understanding this as the degree to which the caregiver feels that the care he is carrying out is impacting on the different areas of his life to his lifeSocial, personal and economic level. To relieve this overload, a series of interventions can be carried out, such as promoting that the caregiver has free time, inform and guide so that he attends self-help groups, as well as psychoeducative programs.
In 1986 George and Gwyther defined the overload as "the set of physical, psychological or emotional, social and economic problems that can be experienced by a person who performs care tasks", but this concept has been provided with some characteristics such as thedistress suffered by the caregiver in the face of problems and the continuous deterioration of the patient.
This overload along with other factors can lead to a phenomenon known as burned or burnout caregiver syndrome. It is considered that this is due to the continuous stress that caregivers suffer, since they are forced to perform the same repetitive tasks every day, together with the feeling of not knowing if the work done will obtain results. All this triggers in a set of problems whose degree of affectation will depend on several factors such as the status of health of the caregiver, the help perceived by the rest of the relatives, on the information about the disease, the way in which eachcaregiver face problems, as well as the ability to deal with complicated moments.
Although the term of the Burnout refers to burning at work due to work stress, it is a situation similar to that felt by the main caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s. Some of the symptoms that characterize this syndrome are: emotional tiredness due.
To assess the caregiver’s overload, the Zarit scale is used (Annex 1), which values the degree of affectation related to the responsibility of care and consists of 22 questions, whose answer options are never, rarely, sometimes many times, many, manytimes and almost always, punctuating you are on a scale of 1 to 5.
As for the interpretations, a value obtained between 22 and 46 would indicate absence of overload;Between 47 and 55, it would correspond to a mild overload;and a result greater than or equal to 56 would indicate intense overload.
Two types of overload can be differentiated. Objective overload is what refers to the time used in the care of the sick person and the fulfillment of the demand for care, while subjective overload is that related to the negative feelings and perceptions that the caregiver feels withRegarding your role.
Some authors such as Ubea or Melo called the caregiver syndrome as the one that appears due to the number of hours dedicated to care for a long period of time, which will have physical symptoms such as headaches, osteo-articular pains, insomnia, among others, andpsychic manifestations such as anxiety, feelings of guilt, stress, etc. Social alterations can also appear such as isolation or suppression of free time, labor problems such as loss of work and with it, economic problems, and in the family environment such as family discussions.
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