As the HIV/AIDS pandemic progresses in Africa, elders are increasingly responsible for the care of orphans. Several reports suggest that elderly Africans do not have the resources to provide care and are at risk of poor health, but few studies have systematically measured health of caregivers. The Kenyan Grandparents Study is a longitudinal study designed to compare elder Luo caregivers to noncaregiving peers. Several measures of health were collected, including body mass index (BMI), blood pressure, glucose, and hemoglobin. In addition, self-perceived health and mental health were measured using the MOS Short-Form 36 (SF-36). It was hypothesized that caregivers would have poorer health than noncaregivers and that the difference in health would widen over the three waves of the study. Caregiving did not affect physical health but did act to decrease mental health and perceived health over time.

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The scale was tested among two hundred Luo elders and was found to be internally reliable (α = .75). Criterion validity was examined through the associations between LPSS score and caregiving, social networks, depression, and cortisol. Known group validity was examined through comparisons of caregiving groups, genders, marital status, and participation in social groups. While these variables were generally associated with LPSS in the predicted direction, subsequent factor analysis suggested that the LPSS did not represent a single domain. Thus, the LPSS requires additional development.Anthropologists and human biologists are increasingly interested in the causes and consequences of psychosocial stress. Although stress research has long been conducted in Western societies, focus on psychosocial stress among non-Western, nonindustrialized societies is relatively new. As a result, most scales designed to measure perceived stress or affective response This project was funded by an

The beneficial impact on grandmothers might indicate a coping strategy. These results indicated that researchers should shift away from comparing caregivers to noncaregivers and instead look at the multiple factors which may make some families resilient and others at risk. Human biologists can contribute to this literature by examining the ecological and cultural contexts under which caregiving represents a burden with physiological repercussions.

This study demonstrates that there is not a simple relationship between caregiving and cardiovascular risk.