Family Caregivers’ Life Shortened

Being a caregiver for a person with Alzheimer’s disease may shorten the caregivers’ life by as much as four to eight years, a U.S. study found.

Ronald Glaser, Jan Kiecolt-Glaser of Ohio State University in Columbus and Nan-ping Weng and his research group from the National Institute of Aging focused on telomeres, areas of genetic material on the ends of a cell’s chromosomes. Over time, as a cell divides, those telomeres shorten, losing genetic instructions. The enzyme telomerase normally works to repair that damage to the chromosome, Glaser said.

Research has shown that mothers caring for chronically ill children developed changes in their chromosomes that effectively amounted to several years of additional aging.

The researchers examined Alzheimer’s disease caregivers and compared them with an equal number of non-caregivers matched for age, gender and other aspects.

We believe that the changes in these immune cells represent the whole cell population in the body, suggesting that all the body’s cells have aged that same amount, Glaser said. Caregivers showed the same kind of patterns present in the study of mothers of chronically ill kids.

In addition, the symptoms of depression in caregivers were twice as severe as those apparent among the control group, the Journal of Immunology reported.