Caregivers as Therapeutic Agents in Dementia Care: The Context of Caregiving and the Evidence Base for Interventions

Given the public health magnitude of dementia and its profound and extreme ripple effects on families, dementia caregiving warrants a focused discussion to understand this particular care context. Thus, the focus of this chapter is on dementia caregiving. The authors integrate and classify the existing evidence for interventions of family caregivers of people with dementia, and in a novel extension to typical reviews, provide a guiding framework for how the effective integration of "best" evidence can help to support the delivery and decision making of care providers when selecting evidence-based services to provide to families in need. They first discuss the therapeutic roles that families assume and provide a framework for understanding family needs, and then examine the robust corpus of intervention studies specific for dementia caregivers and their relative strengths and limitations. Finally, future directions for developing interventions with clinical applicability are outlined.