Investigation of General Health in Female Care givers of Elderly People with Alzheimer

The purpose of this study was to explore the general health status in women as care givers of the elderly people with Alzheimer who attending to the Iranian Association of Alzheimer’s Disease. In this descriptive –cross sectional study as a introductory stage of a randomized controlled field trial, 150 women were recruited with a consecutive sampling method. The study population of this study included the women as family care givers attending to the Iranian Association of Alzheimer Disease. In this study, the inclusion criteria was consisted of women who had 18-60 years old, be a close relative to elderly patients with Alzheimer disease, as well as they have had direct caring with the duration of at least six months. Data collection regarding assessment of general health of the women was a questionnaire including 28 items of Persian version of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). For data analysis, descriptive statistics and chi square were used in the study. The study findings showed that only 24% of the subjects had a good level of general health, but 58.7% and 17.3% of them had a moderate and weak general health respectively. There were significant relations between general health of the women as care givers and the variables such as age (p= 0.016), occupation (p= 0.008), type of relative (p=0.013), and economic status (p= 0.049). However, there were not any significant relation between general health and the other variables of marriage situation (p= 0.5), education (p= 0.07), and duration of caring the elderly patients with Alzheimer (p= 0.205). According to the findings, the considerable percentage of the female care givers of elders with Alzheimer disease did not pose optimum level of general health. As Care givers’ gender centered studies have seldom conducted in Iran, future researches should focus on different dimensions of health promotion among both male and female care givers.