The challenge of care: a look at the health of caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's

Abstract

The caregiver has the property to provide care and remedy the functional disability of the elderly, whether temporary or permanent. The aim of this study is to analyze the relationship between the caregiver and the patient with Alzheimer's and how this interferes with the caregiver's well-being. This is an integrative literature review, whose references were collected from the electronic databases: United States National Library of Medicine (PubMed) and Virtual Health Library (VHL) due to the quality presented in the works of these platforms, in Portuguese and English. Initially, 1,074 publications potentially eligible to participate in the present study were identified. 86 articles were excluded because they were duplicated. Subsequently, 905 articles were excluded because they were not from the last five years, and the abstracts of 83 articles were read, excluding 68 not addressing the theme, five being literature review and three being incomplete articles. Thus, the sample was composed of seven studies that evaluated the health of caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's. Based on the results obtained in the present study, it is possible to observe that caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's stop living their own life to take care of the patient, affecting their personal and family life. It is constantly evidenced that these are informal caregivers, being some family member who, without any preparation and experience, become caregivers. Thus, it is essential to train these professionals in order to offer better care and, above all, to have quality of life and well-being to caregivers.