The Study That Asks the Other Person

Almost all dementia research studies the person with dementia. The Alzheimer's Foundation of America has opened a national survey that studies the spouse instead, asking what years of this does to a person's own body and mind. More than eleven million Americans are caring for someone with dementia, contributing over eighteen billion hours of unpaid care, and a large share of them are married to the person they care for.

The spousal case is structurally its own thing. An adult child goes home at some point in the evening. A husband does not. He is on duty at three in the morning, he is usually the one who noticed the changes first and got told he was imagining it, and he is simultaneously losing the specific person who used to be his backup for everything else in his life. There is remarkably little research on what that arrangement costs the person doing it.

This is an announcement and not yet a finding. The results are the part that will actually matter.