Coping and its relationship to quality of life in dementia caregivers

Abstract

Coping and Quality of Life (QoL) of dementia caregivers has not been studied in the Indian context. Thirty two patients with dementia of Alzheimer’s type were assessed for level of cognitive functioning using Hindi mental state examination and for severity of dementia using Clinical dementia rating. Their key caregivers were assessed using the Coping checklist and WHO-QoL (BREF) Hindi version. Education was positively correlated to total coping score (p = 0.02), problem-solving (p < 0.01), positive distraction (p = 0.04) and acceptance (p = 0.02) and negatively correlated with religion (p = 0.01) and denial (p = 0.01). Use of social support as coping was found to be positively correlated with domains of QoL. Problem-solving was seen to have a significant positive correlation with psychological QoL (p = 0.0471) while denial/blame (p = 0.0068) had significant negative correlation with both physical and psychological QoL. Both coping strategies and QoL has been shown to depend on caregiver characteristics rather than the severity of the patient’s dementia.