Objectives:

To assess the adaptation of family caregivers of patients with dementias. Other objectives are to establish a relationship between burden and resilience, to analyze significant gender differences among caregivers, to detect economic differences and to compare strategies used in order to deal with stress.

Methods:

Four different tests have been used. The first one consists of a sociodemographic interview made by ourselves; the CD-RISC-10 (Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale) questionnaire, which measures the degree of patient resilience; the Caregiver Burden Interview, which measures the different degrees of burden; the last one is the COPE-28 questionnaire, which evaluates the different ways of stress response.

Results:

It has been obtained that the most common profile of the caregiver is a woman between 50 and 60 years of age who has been caring for an Alzheimer's patient for about 6 years. Furthermore, most of the people surveyed have medium resilience and overload, although men obtained greater resilience (with statistical significance) and less overload than women (without it). Regarding resilience, acceptance, active coping and planning strategies predominate, according to the results in CDRISC-10, confirmed by those of COPE-28.

Conclusions:

It has been possible to offer data aimed at improving psychological intervention approaches in family caregivers of patients with dementia, specifically in the area of Navarra, since they establish strategies that COPE-28 has proven to correlate with resilience. Definitely, obtaining scientific evidence on the basis of which to modify therapeutic programs.

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