Researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine provide the first national estimate of caregivers’ pain and arthritis experiences that can limit their ability to perform necessary tasks while caring for older family members. The study suggests screening caregivers for pain issues and offering interventions, particularly to populations that are traditionally underserved. This may help avoid higher health costs and improve the quality of life for both caregivers and their care recipients.
This is one of the few studies focused on quantifying how pain affects caregivers. The paper, published on Sept. 1 in The Gerontologist, analyzed data collected from 1,930 caregivers with a median age of 62, who participated in the 2017 National Study on Caregiving.
“Research on family caregivers’ pain is really scarce,” said lead author Shelbie Turner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. Earlier studies indicated that about 40% of caregivers have arthritis and 50% have pain they identified as “bothersome.”
“I wanted to take it a step further and determine how many of those caregivers have pain that routinely limits their daily activities. This could help us determine the extent of the issue, with a longer-term goal to explore the effect of caregiver pain on care recipients’ unmet needs. For instance, a caregiver having a high pain day could struggle with tasks like getting their relative in and out of bed,” Turner explained.
On the team for this research was Karl Pillemer, director of the Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging, professor of gerontology in medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Hazel E. Reed Professor in the Department of Psychology, and Jamie Robinson, postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.
