The role of sleep problems in the dementia family caregiving stress process

Abstract

Family caregiving for a person with dementia has been associated with negative outcomes for caregivers’ physical and mental health (Schulz et al., 2020). In this field, depression has been a widely studied caregiving outcome (Collins & Kishita, 2020). However, there are other variables that might be just as relevant, but have received less research interest, like anxiety (Kaddour & Kishita, 2020; Van Hout et al., 2023) or sleep problems (Peng & Chang, 2013). Sleep is a relevant variable both due to its impact on health and for its prominent role in understanding the onset and maintenance of other physical and psychological problems. By sleep problems, we refer to difficulties initiating sleep, waking after sleep onset, and prolonged wakefulness during the night that affect to the person’s daily functioning (Cooper et al., 2022; Morin et al., 1993). The available literature suggests that sleep problems are an important variable for understanding physical and psychological distress in caregivers (Leggett et al., 2020). Family caregivers of people with dementia experience sleep problems more frequently than non-caregivers (Brewster et al., 2022; Legget et al., 2020). A systematic review by Peng and Chang (2013) finds that 50-70% of caregivers of people with dementia experience sleep problems. The meta-analysis by Gao and colleagues (2019) finds that caregivers sleep significantly less hours and rate their sleep quality as significantly poorer than non-caregiver controls...