The transition to family caregiving and its effect on biomarkers of inflammation

Significance Family caregiving has been proposed as a type of chronic stress that may lead to health risks through increased systemic inflammation. However, most previous studies of caregiving and inflammation have used small convenience samples and compared caregivers with poorly characterized noncaregiving controls. In this prospective investigation of 480 participants over a 9-y period, only one of six biomarkers showed a significantly larger increase in persons who became caregivers over that time period compared with noncaregiving controls. The size of this one effect was small, and no biomarker effects were found for a subset of strained spouse caregivers of persons with dementia. The findings are consistent with other population-based studies and suggest minimal systemic inflammation in response to chronic caregiving stress.