breaking down barriers to care with people who care.

Embracing technologies that put the clinic wherever the patient is.

Helping health care systems keep pace,

pushing every boundary, till there's room for every patient.

Better health, brighter future.

That's the Decadeaway.

Most people in the world will have to think about caregiving at some point in their lives,

either because they'll need to support family members as they age or become ill,

or because they'll need care themselves.

But in the United States, many folks who act as

caregivers feel like they're in it alone. For Scientific American science quickly, I'm

Rachel Felton. You're listening to episode one of a two-part miniseries

about caregivers, the many challenges they face, and the ways they can find better

support. Our guides for this series are Associate Editor Lauren J Young and Senior Editor Tanya Lewis, both of whom cover health and medicine for Scientific American.

We'll hear from Lauren next week.

Today, Tanya is here to help us understand the scope of the caregiving crisis.

So Tanya, what made you interested in pursuing this story?

So, as we know, so many of us become caregivers ourselves at some point in our lives and this is something that I myself experienced when I became a caregiver for my mom when she was diagnosed

with a very serious lung illness a couple years ago and suddenly I found myself thrust into this role of taking

care of her even though I lived far away and we were experiencing a pandemic at the time but she was eventually fortunately able to receive a lung transplant and after that I was also very involved in her care and just that whole experience of shifting my whole identity to accommodate taking care of her was something that I felt, you know, was probably a very common experience.

And I was talking about this with my colleague Lauren Young, who's our associate health editor. her mom had a similar experience of taking care of her mother who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

And I think that we realized that we both had understood what it was like to become a caregiver and I think we just really wanted to talk to other people and find out what the research shows about what kinds of stresses people experience when their caregivers,

...