Abstract

Caregiver burnout syndrome is an increasingly seen condition, although the subjective nature of self-administered psychometric tests and the lack of a consensual diagnostic tool might hinder a proper diagnosis. The availability of objective psychosomatic measures of stress might facilitate the early diagnosis and clinical management of these patients. For this reason, the aim of this work was to develop a quantitative tool to evaluate the stress level of caregivers in a noninvasive and repeatable manner. An observational, controlled, matched study was designed including a group of 38 principal caregivers of chronic patients and a control group of 38 non-caregivers. Psychometric, biochemical, and electrophysiological data were analyzed along with sociodemographic data. A quantitative chronic stress reference scale (CSRs) was constructed based on the weighted contribution of several psychometric and biochemical variables and afterwards, a predictive psychosomatic model (ESBSm) correlated with CSRs was elaborated from extracted variables of several electrophysiological signals monitored for 10 min. The resulting CSR scale shows a high power to discriminate caregivers from the control group while the ESBSm shows a 79% correlation with the CSR scale validated through a 5-fold process. Therefore, the results demonstrate that the ESBS model is an objective and validated tool to diagnose the degree of stress linked to burnout in caregivers of chronic patients from a 10-min session of noninvasive monitoring with a reliability equivalent to the questionnaires currently used to quantify stress in caregivers.

摘要

照顾者倦怠综合征是一种越来越常见的情况，尽管自我管理的心理测试的主观性和缺乏共识的诊断工具可能会阻碍正确的诊断。压力的客观心身测量的可用性可能有助于这些患者的早期诊断和临床管理。出于这个原因，这项工作的目的是开发一种定量工具，以非侵入性和可重复的方式评估护理人员的压力水平。设计了一项观察性、对照、匹配的研究，包括一组 38 名慢性病患者的主要护理人员和一组 38 名非护理人员。与社会人口学数据一起分析了心理测量、生化和电生理数据。基于几个心理测量和生化变量的加权贡献构建了一个定量的慢性压力参考量表 (CSR)，然后，从监测 10 分钟的几个电生理信号的提取变量中阐述了与 CSR 相关的预测心身模型 (ESBSm)。由此产生的 CSR 量表显示出区分护理人员与对照组的强大能力，而 ESBSm 显示与通过 5 倍过程验证的 CSR 量表有 79% 的相关性。因此，结果表明 ESBS 模型是一种客观且经过验证的工具，可通过 10 分钟的无创监测会话来诊断与慢性病患者护理人员倦怠相关的压力程度，其可靠性相当于目前用于量化压力的问卷在照顾者中。