Social work Assistant Professors Noelle Fields and Ling Xu won a $459,994 National Institutes of Health grant for their research on reducing the burden and stress of caregivers for Alzheimer's patients and increasing their wellbeing and knowledge of the disease. They are working with the Senior Companion Program on the project, part of the Corporation for National and Community Service.
"Family caregivers are the main providers of support to people with dementia, and they are faced with many challenges in their role compared to non-dementia caregivers," Dr. Xu says. "Those challenges include high levels of stress, depression, and anxiety."
She and Dr. Fields hope to create a cost-effective and sustainable intervention that the Senior Companion Program can use across the nation.
"To date, few studies have used lay providers for dementia caregiving interventions and no studies have used the Senior Companion Program as a platform for this type of family caregiver intervention," Fields says. "Our intervention, the Senior Companion Program Plus, adds a component specific to dementia family caregivers."
