Associations Across Caregiver and Care Recipient Symptoms: Self-Organizing Map and Meta-analysis

The main objective of this study was to reveal generalizable associations across caregiver burden (CGB), caregiver depression (CGD), care recipient cognitive ability (CRCA), and care recipient behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD).

Studies published between 2004 and 2014 and reporting CGB and/or CGD together with CRCA and/or BPSD were included. Only 95 out of 1,955 studies provided enough data for data clustering with the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) and 27 of them for meta-analyses based on correlation coefficients.

Caregiver and care recipient symptoms were not tightly associated with each other, except for the CGB-BPSD interaction at the individual level. SOM emphasized the cluster comprising studies reporting low CGB, low CGD, high CRCA, and few BPSD. Meta-analyses indicated high heterogeneity between the original studies.

Relationships between caregiver and care recipient symptoms should be treated as situation-specific phenomena, at least when the symptoms are moderate at most. Dementia caregiving per se should not be understood as a source of stress and mental health problems. More systematic and coherent use of measures is necessary to enable a comprehensive analysis of caregiving.