Finding
Older adults with dementia represent only about 10% of people ages 65 and older living in residential care and traditional community settings, yet they receive a disproportionate share of all unpaid care hours (41%), and their informal caregivers make up one-third of all caregivers. Overall, daughters provide the largest share of unpaid care hours for people with dementia (39%), followed by spouses (25%), sons (17%), and other family and friends (20%).
Adults ages 70 and older with dementia received more than twice as many hours of monthly care on average than adults without dementia: 171 hours versus 66 hours.
People with dementia who are women, Black, have low income, or have low levels of education are all less likely than their counterparts to have a spouse available to provide care, but more likely to have adult children caregivers.
When adult children are available to provide care, a person with dementia is more likely to continue to live at home rather than move to a nursing home. One nationally representative study shows that nearly one-third of adults with dementia who had no adult children and were living in the community when they were interviewed were receiving nursing home care two years later, as were one-quarter of those without an adult child living within 10 miles of them. By comparison, 11% of those who had an adult child living with them had moved to a nursing home two years later.
When older adults with dementia move into assisted living or other residential care settings, family caregiving does not end: 80% of people with dementia living in residential care had at least one unpaid caregiver assisting with their personal care or household activities.
Older adults with dementia have larger caregiving networks than those without dementia and are twice as likely to have multiple caregivers sharing tasks.
Read the full article with references: Fact Sheet: U.S. Dementia Trends from the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), October 2021.