The effects of outpatient geriatric evaluation and management on caregiver burden.

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Abstract
This study investigated the effects of outpatient geriatric evaluation and management (GEM) on informal caregivers' sense of burden. We randomized 568 high-risk, community-dwelling older adults to receive either GEM or usual care for 6 months. At baseline and one year later, we assessed the burden experienced by their informal caregivers (N = 88). Compared with caregivers of participants in the usual care group, caregivers of participants in the GEM group were less than half as likely to report increased burden during the one-year follow-up period (16.7% vs 38.5%, p = .034). The findings suggest that GEM helps protect the informal caregivers of high-risk older people from the increases in burden that often accompany advancing age.