BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Pain Res.
Sec. Geriatric Pain
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpain.2025.1661457
Pain-Attributed Care Task Difficulty Among Dementia Caregivers with Chronic Pain
Provisionally accepted
- 1Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University, New York, United States
- 2Cornell University College of Human Ecology, Ithaca, United States
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Introduction: Chronic pain is highly prevalent among dementia family caregivers (henceforth “caregivers”). We used a nationwide sample of caregivers with chronic pain to identify the extent to which caregivers attribute pain to any difficulty they have with caregiving. Methods: Caregivers (N = 269) reported if they experienced difficulty performing ten individual care tasks and if ‘yes’, how much of the difficulty they attributed to pain (0 = not a reason for my difficulty, 10 = the biggest reason for my difficulty). We ran ANOVA models to determine between-group differences in pain-attributed difficulty with care tasks. Results: When asked about the extent to which pain contributed to the difficulty helping care recipients with a given care task, caregivers’ average response was 6.81 for basic activities of daily living and 6.49 for instrumental activities of daily living. Compared to White caregivers, Black caregivers attributed less of their difficulty with basic activities of daily living to pain (estimate = –1.17, p = 0.04). Discussion: Caregiver pain is not only highly prevalent may also be consequential to caregiving outcomes.
Keywords: caregiving, Chronic Pain, Activities of Daily Living, racial differences, Caregiving difficulty
Received: 07 Jul 2025; Accepted: 10 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Turner, Lee, Pillemer and Reid. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Shelbie Turner, stu4002@med.cornell.edu
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