Table 1.

Study Characteristics.

Reference	Country	Target population	Data collection mode	Outcome measure(s)	Key findings
Alexopoulos et al. (2021)	Greece	67 ICs of individuals with mind and major neurocognitive disorder	Telephone questionnaire	Distress	Caregiver distress was influenced by memory deficits and neuropsychiatric symptoms.
Altieri and Santangelo (2021)	Italy	84 ICs of PWD	Online survey	Anxiety, depression, resilience, and caregiver burden	The multivariate analysis of variance revealed an effect of time (before and during the lockdown) in the whole group on depression scores. Caregivers with high resilience showed a more significant increase of anxiety levels during lockdown than caregivers with low resilience.
					Regression analysis revealed caregiver burden was associated negatively with resilience scores and positively with higher functional dependence.
Borges-Machado et al. (2020)	Portugal	36 ICs of individuals with neurocognitive disorder	Telephone interview	Caregiver burden	There was an increase in IC burden and a decline IC well-being. Pre- and post-confinement comparisons showed that care recipients significantly declined their independence in activities of daily living and increased Neuropsychiatric Inventory total score.
Cohen et al. (2020)	Argentina	80 ICs of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease	Questionnaire	Stress	Overall, COVID-19 confinement increased IC stress independently of the dementia stage. However, ICs caring for severe cases had more stress compared to those caring for individuals with milder forms of Alzheimer’s disease.
					ICs main concerns were for severe dementia cases, fear of absence of the paid caregiver during the epidemic, and, for those caring for mild cases of dementia, fear of spreading the disease while assisting patients with instrumental activities.
Giebel et al. (2020)	England	50 ICs of PWD	Telephone interview	Anxiety	ICs of PWD were greatly affected by the sudden removal of social support services and concerned about when services would re-open. ICs were worried about whether the person they cared for would still be able to re-join social support services.
Mazzi et al. (2020)	Italy	239 ICs of PWD	Telephone interview	Anxiety and depression	Education was associated with significantly lower overall anxiety and depression scores while days of isolation and female gender were associated with the higher scores for ICs. A marked reduction of health services was observed in all care recipients.
Panerai et al. (2020)	Italy	128 ICs of individuals with major neurocognitive disorder	Telephone interview	Distress	ICs are at an increased risk of burnout due to changes related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rainero et al. (2021)	Italy	4,913 ICs of PWD	Telephone interview	Anxiety, depression, and distress	ICs reported a high increase in anxiety, depression, caregiver burden, and distress.
Tsapanou et al. (2020)	Greece	204 ICs	Questionnaire	Psychological burden	ICs reported a great increase in psychological and physical burden during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vaitheswaran et al. (2020)	India	31 ICs of PWD	Telephone survey	Caregiver burden	ICs had multiple needs during the changes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. A multilayered approach to support is necessary.