Caring for Dementia Caregivers in Times of the COVID-19 Crisis: A Systematic Review

Dementia is progressive and deteriorates during the progression of the disease affecting several millions
of older people worldwide. The burden of caring for people with dementia is enormous and caregivers face serious
psychological challenges from their caregiving roles. Dementia caregivers are exposed to psychological distresses
such as stress, anxiety and depression. While there is robust literature on caregiver burden and their psychological
effects, there are gaps in current knowledge about how best caregivers get the support that they need in order to
prevent themselves from becoming the hidden victims, especially in unprecedented times such as the coronavirus
2019 (COVID-19) crisis. The aim of this paper was to apply the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and
meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines to conduct a systematic review of psychological and psychosocial outcomes.
Targeted outcomes included stress, anxiety, depression, mental wellbeing, caregivers’ support, psychosocial and
psychological interventions. We searched for relevant articles using PubMed, Google Scholar, Science Direct, and
ProQuest. We used search terms from the keywords to identify publications that were most relevant to our questions.
Eight papers were finally selected and reviewed. Findings showed that dementia caregivers are mostly
informal/family caregivers, mostly female and lack the knowledge about dementia. Further, findings revealed that
dementia caregivers can be isolated from mainstream society. Consequently, they suffer from care burden and other
psychological problems. Dementia caregivers can benefit from internet-based or web-based interventions. Although
there are inconsistencies in methodological approaches of the various interventions, the interventions are effective.
Findings further revealed that dementia caregivers are isolated from mainstream society due to the nature of their
caregiving roles, and can access effective psychosocial and psychological interventions via the internet-based or
web-based especially in unprecedented times such as the COVID-19 crisis.