Unpaid caregiving across the lifespan and health outcomes in later life.

Unpaid caregiving for loved ones with health limitations is a common life course experience that often renders lasting health consequences. Yet few studies adopt a life course lens to examine how caregiving accumulates over time to shape health in later life. Most research treats caregiving as a discrete event confined to a single life stage, thereby obscuring its cumulative nature. Using retrospective caregiving histories in the 2017 and 2019 Life History Mail Survey, an off-wave supplement to the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), this study identifies distinct lifespan caregiving profiles among 3194 ever-caregivers through latent class analysis, based on age at first care onset, recurrence, total duration, and overlap. Four profiles emerged: Compressed Caregivers (brief caregiving in later life), Early Enduring Caregivers (early and sustained caregiving), Recurrent Caregivers (multiple sequential caregiving episodes), and Immersed Caregivers (early, prolonged, and overlapping caregiving). Using HRS health measures, we assessed how these caregiving profiles relate to later-life health, stratified by gender. Compared with non-caregivers, women in the Immersed and Early Enduring profiles reported more chronic conditions, women in the Immersed profile experienced more depressive symptoms, and both women and men in the Compressed and Recurrent profiles showed lower odds of cognitive impairment. By linking lifespan caregiving patterns to multiple later-life health domains, this study highlights the importance of a cumulative life course perspective to understanding caregiving's long-term health impacts. Findings underscore the need for tailored supports that account for caregivers' diverse and accumulated experiences.