New Research Funding Awarded to Evaluate Interventions for Family Caregivers

Based on a collaborative effort between the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Nursing Research, a new 5-year multi-site program has been established call "REACH" - Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer's Caregiver Health". The program sites, titles of their individual research projects, and names of the Principal Investigators at each site are as follows:

  1. University of Alabama at Birmingham: "Skill Training for African American and White Caregivers" - Louis Burgio, Ph.D.
  2. Veterans Affairs Medical Center and University of Tennessee, Memphis: "Providers and Alzheimer's Caregivers Together (PACT) - A Primary Care Model for Enhancing Family Caregiving" - Robert Burns, M.D.
  3. University of Miami Center on Adult Development and Aging: "Family Based Interventions for Caregivers" - Carl Eisdorfer, Ph.D., M.D.
  4. Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System & Stanford University, Palo Alto: "Treatment of Distress in Hispanic and Anglo Caregivers" - Dolores Gallagher-Thompson, Ph.D.
  5. Boston University Medical Center Hospital: "TLC (Telephone-Linked Care) Telephone System for Alzheimer's Family Caregivers" - Diane Mahoney, Ph.D., GNP.

In addition to these five individual research programs (each with its own unique focus and type of interventions), there is a Coordinating Center as well, at the University of Pittsburgh headed by Richard Schulz, Ph.D. A key role of the Coordinating Center is to assist in the development of a common battery of care descriptive and outcome measures that will be used across sites, thereby allowing aggregation of larger sample sizes to use in later data analyses. The REACH project should provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the impact of a broad range of innovative psychosocial interventions for alleviation of caregiver distress. Due to the planned inclusion of several hundred African-American and Hispanic family caregivers, the REACH centers will also be able to study whether or not these particular interventions have differential effects on specific racial and/or ethnic minorities.

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