Randomized controlled trials on promoting self-care behaviors among informal caregivers of older patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Key findings used in wiki

• Across 18 RCTs, caregiver "self-care" remains underdefined in the literature — giving GiveCare explicit permission to define its own practical micro-intervention taxonomy because the field lacks a clean one.
• Most reviewed interventions concentrate on mental health and individual coping capacity, which GiveCare uses to justify keeping those primitives but not stopping there.
• The review flags neglected domains (disease prevention, physical health, self-monitoring, health literacy, decision-making, health-system linkage) that GiveCare treats as deliberate additions to its primitive set.
• The pooled effect is small-but-significant on depression and weaker on anxiety and physical health, supporting modest, honest non-clinical framing rather than outcome claims.
• The evidence gaps map onto GiveCare's choice to include health-system linkage and decision-support as one-next-step primitives, not just emotion-focused content.