Determining the relationship between the incidence of elder abuse and care burden in elderly people with informal caregivers who refer to selected hospitals in Tehran

One of the problems that significantly affects the quality of life and health of the elderly is elder abuse, which is usually not reported. The present study was conducted in order to examine the relationship between the possibility of elder abuse and the care burden of caregivers in elderly people with informal caregivers referring to selected hospitals in Tehran.

The current study is a cross-sectional descriptive study that was conducted in 2020 on 370 elderly people who is cognitively or functionally dependent and has a resident family caregiver living in Tehran with family caregivers who were chosen as available samples from outpatients to daily clinics of selected hospitals. Interviews with the elderly and caregivers in outpatient clinics were used to obtain data on abuse, care burden, and demographic factors. The Elderly Abuse by caregivers Questionnaire was used to measure elder abuse, and the Zarit Questionnaire in Persian was employed to assess the burden of care. In this study, descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, and percentages were used to describe the data, and Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to check the correlation between variables and the relationship between quantitative variables from ANOVA test. All related analyzes were performed using SPSS v.25 software. And probability value less than 0.05 was considered as statistical significance.

The average age of caregivers and elderly was 47.04 ± 12.76 and 69.39 ± 8.54 years, respectively. In this study, the average probability of elder abuse by the caregiver was 66.5 and the average care burden of caregivers was 48.3. This study showed that there is a significant relationship between the possibility of elder abuse and care burden (P<0.001). The demographic variables of gender, education, employment and marital status of the caregiver were not significant with the possibility of elder abuse, but the difference of the economic status variable of the caregiver with the possibility of elder abuse was significant (P<0.01). Also, no significant relationship was found between the variables of gender, marital status, and employment of the elderly with the possibility of elder abuse, but a significant relationship was found with the variables of education status and economic status (P<0.01). There was no significant relationship between the duration of disability and the possibility of elder abuse.

The present study reports the high probability of elder abuse towards the elderly under the pressure of caregivers' care, so this highlights the need for timely and continuous attention from the organizations related to this social issue in order to avoid situations that can lead to an increase in the care burden of caregivers and create Identify, control and prevent the occurrence of elder abuse.