Coping Strategies and Anxiety in Caregivers of People with Alzheimer's Disease: the LASER-AD Study

Background: Caregivers of people with dementia (CGPD) frequently have anxiety symptoms but little is known about the relationship of anxiety with coping strategies.

Method: 126 people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and their family caregivers living in the community were recruited from local psychiatric services, the voluntary sector and care homes. Sampling was designed to ensure that the sample was epidemiologically representative in terms of dementia severity, gender and care setting. We used the anxiety subscale of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) to measure anxiety and the Brief COPE to measure coping strategies.

Results: Use of dysfunctional coping strategies (Wald = 7.3, p = 0.007) and HADS depression caseness (Wald = 14.0, p < 0.001) were the only factors that predicted HADS anxiety caseness on logistic regression.

Limitations: Anxious caregivers may be more likely to report their coping strategies negatively; these results do not clarify direction of causality.

Conclusions: Dysfunctional coping strategies and depression appear to be the most important factors predicting caregiver anxiety. Addressing coping strategies may be a helpful intervention for managing caregiver anxiety.