Caring for a spouse with Alzheimer's disease or a related disorder (ADRD) is an enormous burden that has been linked with a variety of negative physical and mental health outcomes for the caregiver. Preliminary evidence suggests that caregiving demands may lead to adverse health effects by negatively influencing caregivers' self-care behaviors. The broad objective of this research is to design, implement, and evaluate a telephone counseling intervention based on Social Cognitive Theory to promote self-care behaviors of spouse caregivers. The five specific aims of the proposed research are: 1) to conduct six focus group interviews to inform the process of designing a telephone counseling intervention to promote self-care behaviors among caregivers who provide in-home care to a spouse with ADRD, 2) to design the curriculum for a telephone counseling intervention to improve self-care behaviors (i.e., weight management, exercise, sleep patterns, stress management), 3) to conduct a field test of the intervention with 200 randomly selected experimental and control group subjects recruited from spouse caregivers of patients seen at the Michigan Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (MADRC), 4) to evaluate the process of implementing the intervention, including the extent to which the delivered activities fit the original design and factors external to the program competed with program effects., and (5) to evaluate the impact of the intervention of caregiver self-care behaviors, self-efficacy for self-care, physical health, depression, and caregiver burden. Data will be collected by telephone at baseline and 3,6,9, and 12 month follow-up assessments. Experimental group subjects will be contacted once a week throughout the 9-month intervention period to assess progress on self-care goals. In addition, each subject will record their self-cre behaviors in a daily health diary. Analyses will determine the effects of: 1) the intervention on physical health, depression, and caregiver burden, 2) components of the intervention on specific behavioral and self-efficacy changes, and 3) important mediating variables (e.g., patient severity) on the outcomes. The long-term objective of this research is to test the telephone counseling intervention as part of a randomized clinical trial with a large representative and diverse caregiver population.
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