We would like to thank Rivera-Navarro and Benito-León for their suggestions concerning our article titled “Characteristics of informal caregivers of patients with dementia in Alicante province”.1 We agree that these suggestions enrich the discussion and reflections on informal care for dementia patients.
However, the environment surrounding dementia patients is so complex that we deemed it more appropriate to focus on describing the profiles and roles of the different types of caregivers of these patients. We believe that ours is a novel objective since it goes beyond merely describing primary caregivers, and this is why we did not consider or analyse the care-related costs of these patients. We did find it striking, however, that very few caregivers in our study left their jobs or were obliged to reduce their working hours in order to care for patients. This may be due to the presence of a generation of women, middle-aged at present, whose cultural background has led them to be home-makers and, by extension, also caregivers.2–5 In any case, we would like to thank Rivera-Navarro and Benito-León for the recommended readings,6–10 which add to our general knowledge of and interest in dementia, and also constitute a useful source of data for subsequent studies.
As these authors rightly explain, rotation is a care model for dementia patients that is largely restricted to Mediterranean countries6; in northern European countries, it appears that formal care is much more common.11 Likewise, we were surprised to find such a small number of patients with this type of care model in our study1 compared to the one by Rivera-Navarro et al.6 We must stress, however, that the two studies are not comparable due to the differences in the number of patients/caregivers. Furthermore, in contrast with the article mentioned above, our main purpose was not to describe the reasons why patients live at home rather than rotating between different relatives’ households.
In conclusion, we appreciate our colleagues’ suggestions and their interest in our study, since they enrich our knowledge of a complex disease affecting not only patients, but also a network of informal or supporting caregivers that grows as our society evolves.12,13
Please cite this article as: Toribio Díaz ME, Medrano Martínez V, Moltó Jordá JM, Beltrán Blasco I. Red de cuidadores informales de los pacientes con demencia en la provincia de Alicante, descripción de sus características. Réplica. Neurología. 2015;30:184–185.
