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Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2272
igaa057.2272
Abstracts
Session 5930 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Enrolling Incident Caregivers and Matched Controls From a Nationwide Epidemiological Study
Roth David 1 Haley William 2 Sheehan Orla 3 Rhodes J David 4 Howard Virginia 4 1 
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
2 
University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, United States
3 
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
4 
University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”658 658
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Participants in the national Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study were asked about family caregiving responsibilities at enrollment (2003-2007). Among the 88% of participants who were not caregivers at enrollment, 1,229 reported becoming caregivers before a follow-up interview 12 years later. The Caregiving Transitions Study screened these participants and enrolled 251 as incident caregivers. All reported 5 or more hours of care per week, provided assistance with at least one ADL or IADL, and were caregivers for at least 3 months before a 2nd blood sample was obtained in the REGARDS study. A total of 251 noncaregiving control participants who reported no caregiving responsibilities over this 12-year period were also enrolled. Each control was matched to a caregiver on age (+ 5 years), sex, race, other demographics, and baseline (pre-caregiving) health variables. Descriptive analyses confirm the unique comparability of the samples compared to previous caregiving studies.