Caregivers for persons with Alzheimer's disease.

Families have always cared for relatives with dementia, but scientific advances in diagnosis, management, and treatment will make caring more challenging as more people are diagnosed in early stages and more live longer in severe stages with better health care. This paper discusses the increasing prevalence, the economic value and cost of caregiving, the impact of caregiving in families with and without dementia, the subjective experience of dementia and quality of life, the ethical challenges of clinician-family partnerships, the complexity of family systems and processes that impact care patterns, homicide-suicide in caregiving, long-term care staff training, and theoretic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]