Behavioural and psychological symptoms have been linked to higher levels of distress p38 MAPK inhibitors clinical trials in caregivers and this is further exacerbated by problem alcohol use in older adults (Sattar et al., 2007). In our study, the older adult’s severity of behavioural and psychological symptoms had an independent effect on co-resident psychological morbidity and also explained 29.1% of the total effect of heavy drinking among the elderly on co-resident psychological morbidity. Our main association was partially explained by the severity of participant’s psychological and behavioural symptoms and not by disability. Some of the other mechanisms that account
for psychological morbidity in co-residents of younger heavy drinkers, include non-random pairing of similar individuals (Crow and Felsenstein, 1968), failure on the part of alcoholic family member to participate in everyday family events and their inability to relate to family members in a non-argumentative manner (Zweben, 1986), accumulated negative life events (Homish et al., 2006), poorer health and psychosocial functioning (Dunne,
1994 and Graham and Schmidt, 1999) and the increased risk of alcohol related violence (Cunradi et al., 1999). Future research needs to explore these other potential mechanisms among the older adult population. The strengths of our study lie in the large community sample of older adults, the good response rate and the use of cross-culturally validated assessments. However, the selleck compound cross-sectional design of the study makes it difficult to make conclusions about the temporality of association
between heavy alcohol use among older adults and psychological morbidity among their co-residents. Self-reports of alcohol consumption may not be accurate because of memory problems Bay 11-7085 and difficulties in mental averaging among older persons, however, we did not find major changes in our findings when we repeated the analysis after excluding participants with dementia. We have defined heavy drinking based on ‘safe’ drinking recommendations made for younger age groups. It is quite possible that we have underestimated prevalence and estimations would be much higher if we had applied the American Geriatrics Society (Moos et al., 2004) definition of at-risk alcohol use for over 65 year olds as, on average, more than 1 drink per day or more than 7 drinks per week. However, even if were to use this definition of heavy alcohol use, it would still be difficult to compare with previous studies considering the wide variability in measurement of drinking patterns as an outcome. Another limitation is that information about participants’ behavioural problems has been obtained from the co-resident. This introduces a potential bias as psychological morbidity (especially depression) could influence the co-residents perception and report of participants’ behavioural symptoms.
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