Discussion

摘要

Main findings The REMCARE trial evaluated the impact of being offered the opportunity to attend joint reminiscence groups on people with dementia and their caregivers.With 487 people with dementia/family caregiver pairs, this is the largest trial of any reminiscence-based intervention for people with dementia in the world literature. The primary planned analyses do not show any benefit from being allocated to receive the reminiscence intervention for either people with dementia or their caregivers, in terms of quality of life, for the person with dementia, or psychological distress, for the family caregiver. No effect was found on the autobiographical memory of people with dementia, or on their mood or functional level when examining the secondary outcome variables. Similarly, no benefits for the family caregiver, in terms of mood and stress, were identified. Neither people with dementia nor their caregivers reported any improvement in quality of relationship. A difference does emerge on one of the four subscales of the primary outcome measure for caregivers, the anxiety subscale of the GHQ. On this subscale, those caregivers randomised to receive reminiscence report higher levels of anxiety at the 10-month end point, whereas those allocated to receive treatment as usual show a reduced level of anxiety at this point.