10 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT
Caregiving & Dementia

1. More than 50 million people provide care for a chronically ill, disabled or aged family member or friend during any given year.
2. Approximately 80% of home care services are provided by family members.2
   
3. At least 20% of family caregivers suffer from depression, twice the rate of the general population.3
4. Caregiving for a parent substantially increases women’s risks of living in poverty and receiving public asssistance later in life.3
5. Among working caregivers caring for a family or friend aged 65+, two-thirds rearrange their work schedule,  decrease their hours or take an unpaid leave in order to meet their caregiving responsibilities.3-4  This increases among those caring for someone with dementia.3-5
6. Every 71 seconds, someone in America develops Alzheimer’s, a progressive disease with an average duration of 8 years. That’s 1 in 8 of the 78 million baby boomers.8
7. Informal caregivers personally lose about $660,000 over a life time including Social Security, pension benefits and forgone wages.3
8. American businesses lose as much as $34 billion each year due to caregiver leave.6
9. 9 The value of the services family caregivers provide for “free” is estimated to be $306 billion a year.  That is almost twice as much as is actually spent on homecare and nursing home services combined ($158 billion).7
   
10. Family caregiving has been shown to postpone institutionalization of persons with moderate dementia by nearly a year.  With the average annual cost of nursing home care amounting to $75,000 per person, any delay equates to a real savings for all involved.3
    

SOURCES

1) U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 1998 and National Family Caregivers Association, 2000.  
2) US General Accounting Office, 1994.  
3) Family Caregiver Alliance (see caregiver.org).  
4) National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), 1998.
5) Alzheimer’s Association and National Alliance for Caregiving, 2004.  
6) Metlife Mature Market Institute and National Alliance for Caregiving, 2006.  
7) Arn, Peter S., Dept. of Veterans Affairs, NIH, 2006.
8) Alzheimer’s Association, Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, 2008.

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