Introduction:

The Alzheimer´s disease is a degenerative and progressive change in the brain. It course consists of different stages: mild, moderate and severe, where the patients loss mental capacities slowly and depend on and needs care from other person. The incessant care to this patient generate bad consequences to the caregiver and family as well.

Objective:

To correlate the perceived overload of the principal caregiver with the socioeconomic and clinical characteristics of Alzheimer disease.

Methods:

A descriptive correlational study was conducted at the Polyclinic Carlos Manuel Portuondo in Marianao. The study group consisted of 35 patients with Alzheimer's disease in mild to moderate stages and their primary caregivers. To gather information was used a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Scale of Zarit. A database using SPSS 15.0 for Windows was formed. The Pearson correlation coefficient for the relationship between variables was used, the results were presented in contingency table.

Results:

In patients with a mean age of 77.06 years was obtained, the women were 80.00 %, 42.85 % married and the same percentage finished high school, the 74.28 % in the mild stage of the disease. 74.3 % of caregivers experienced levels of overload due to the work of care. There is significant relationship between perceived caregiver overload and stage of disease (r = 0.346). Conclusions: A significant relationship between the stages of Alzheimer's disease and perceived by the caregiver overload was found.

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