A study published January 22, 2026 in Frontiers in Public Health found that the share of dementia caregivers providing 20 or more hours of care a week, and other markers of caregiving intensity, varied substantially across states, even as national totals lined up with prior research on dementia caregiving. The analysis, led by Joseph Gaugler of the University of Minnesota's BOLD Public Health Center of Excellence on Dementia Caregiving with coauthors from the Alzheimer's Association and the Gerontological Society of America, used 2021 to 2022 data from the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a phone survey of adults in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. The researchers compared dementia caregivers, caregivers of people without dementia, and non-caregivers nationally across 47 states (Florida, Montana and Tennessee did not run the caregiving module in that period), then looked in closer detail at five states chosen to represent different US regions: New York, Arizona, Minnesota, Idaho and Maine. National figures on dementia caregiving were consistent with earlier research, the paper reports, but
State data show wide gaps in how much care dementia caregivers give and get
A national analysis of federal health survey data finds dementia caregivers report more intense caregiving than other caregivers nationally, but the size of that gap shifts sharply when researchers looked state by state.
The authors conclude that patchy state-level data make it harder to target support where caregivers report the heaviest loads, and they call for more consistent local surveillance so public health agencies and legislators can see where dementia caregiving is most intensive. The paper does not name which of the five states had the highest or lowest burden in the reported abstract text, underscoring that state-by-state specifics require reading the full tables rather than a summary.