Resilience in a Greek Sample of Informal Dementia Caregivers: Familism as a Culture-Specific Factor.

The aim of this study was to examine the prevalence and the factors associated with resilience among a sample of 118 Greek informal caregivers (78.8% females, mean age=58.9, SD=11.6) of people with dementia. Face-to-face interviews assessed caregivers' socio-demographics, resilience, quality of life, burden, familism, and perception of services and their proxy assessments of the cognitive functioning, functional activity, and behavioral problems of people with dementia. Moderate levels of resilience were reported by 58.6% of the caregivers. Dementia-related knowledge and higher levels of familism were associated with higher levels of resilience, whereas higher frequency of dealing with behavioral problems was associated with lower resilience. Effective interventions to strengthen Greek dementia caregivers' resilience should be culture-specific, targeting both behavioral problems and caregivers' intrapersonal facilitators (i.e, dementia-related knowledge) and interpersonal interactions (i.e., familism). Healthcare professionals may have a key role in building caregivers' resilience and contribute to implications for policy and practice.

Psychometric properties of the QLQ-C30 (version 3.0) in a sample of ambulatory Cretan cancer patients.

The aim of the present study was to test the psychometric properties of the Quality of Life Questionnaire (QLQ-C30, version 3.0) in a sample of ambulatory cancer patients, mostly low educated and coming from rural areas of the island of Crete. The sample consisted of 188 lung, breast and colorectal cancer patients. Their quality of life (QoL) has been evaluated twice: before and after the first therapeutic intervention. Alpha coefficients ranged from 0.88 to 0.98. Inter-scale correlations were more substantial between the physical, role and fatigue scales. Mean score differences between groups of patients with different performance status (PS) were statistically significant for most of the sub-scales. Instead the patients with stable PS after treatment showed worse functioning in five from the nine sub-scales. For those whose PS has deteriorated, their subjective evaluation indicated deterioration only for physical, role and social functioning. In this sample of mainly ambulatory cancer patients, the instrument has high coefficients of reliability and good clinical validity. However, the results related to its sensitivity are not very consistent. It has proven able to detect clinically significant changes after the therapeutic intervention only for the patients who deteriorated over time and for three specific dimensions of QoL: physical, role and social functioning.

Socio-demographic factors and self-reported functional status: the significance of social support.

BACKGROUND: The aim of the present work was to investigate the relative importance of socio-demographic and physical health status factors for subjective functioning, as well as to examine the role of social support. METHODS: A cross-sectional health survey was carried out in a Greek municipality. 1356 adults of the general population were included in the study. Personal interviews were conducted with house-to-house visits. The response rate was 91.2%. Functioning has been measured by five indexes: 'The Social Roles and Mobility' scale (SORM), 'The Self-Care Restrictions' scale (SCR), 'The Serious Limitations' scale (SL), 'The Minor Self-care Limitations' scale (MSCR) and 'The Minor Limitations in Social Roles and Mobility' scale (MSORM). RESULTS: Among the two sets of independent variables, the socio-demographic ones had significant influence on the functional status, except for MSORM. Allowing for these variables, the physical health status indicators had also significant effects on all functioning scales. Living arrangements and marital status had significant effects on four out of five indexes, while arthritis, Parkinson's disease, past stroke and kidney stones had significant effects on the SCR and SL scales. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that socio-demographic factors are as important as physical health variables in affecting a person's ability to function normally in their everyday life. Social support appears to play a significant role in explaining differences in subjective functioning: people living alone or only with the spouse, particularly the elderly, seem to be in greater risk for disability problems and should be targeted by preventive programs in the community.