Almost 11 million Americans are providing care to a loved one with Alzheimer's disease.

That's according to a new report by the Alzheimer's Association, who surveyed caregivers to find out the difficulties they faced.

What topped the list of stressors in their loved one?

The care they needed for caregivers in Kentucky?

It is an even greater hardship.

We explain why in our first segment and what our new initiative next chapter.

It's a CD initiative focused on the issues facing Kentucky's aging population.

We hear a lot of people say once you've met one person with Alzheimer's, you've met one person with Alzheimer's.

It is an incredibly complex disease.

And it's one that's putting more Kentuckians in a difficult and stressful role.

According to the Alzheimer's Association, close to 160,000 people are providing millions of hours in unpaid care to the more than 80,000 Kentuckians living with Alzheimer's disease.

Many of those caregivers are experiencing their own health issues.

More than 65% of caregivers in Kentucky report having a chronic health condition and almost 40% say they are dealing with depression.

21% say they are in poor physical health.

It's just wearing that every day.

It's like Groundhog Day that they are taking care of their loved one in home, in their home, and they're socially isolated.

But I do think a lot of people don't talk about the physical stress that it takes.

You might be cooking all of the time and cleaning all of the time and helping with bathing and showering.

You might be helping them get dressed and picking them up.

And there's a lot of physical work that goes with it as well.

Being a caregiver, if you're thinking about how much it's taking, how much it costs for you to stay home and keep your loved ones safe in the home, but also, if you were working, you might have to leave the workforce, leave work early, go in late so that there's a financial cost with that as well.

One more gap that I see frequently is people wait too long to put their loved one in a higher level of care because they feel like they are abandoning their loved one and taking them to a nursing home or an assisted living place.

And they won't be with them.

And a national survey of caregivers by the Alzheimer's Association, more than half said coordinating care and navigating the health care system to get their loved one diagnosed and in treatment was the most stressful part of caregiving.

So a lot of caregivers, even if they don't have these skills, are learning all about the health care system by default that they're making extra phone calls and traveling all over the state to get to the right doctor.

So they're finding a primary care physician that will listen to them.

They're saying, Oh, no, you're just getting old.

That's a normal sign of aging.

You don't need a cognitive test yet.

And so then you might wait a whole nother year to go back in for your annual visit and say to your primary care physician, I really think I'm having a cognitive issue.

And if it takes a whole nother year.

By the time you get down the road to neurologist, additional testing, etc., it could be too late for some of these early treatments.

The Alzheimer's Association report also says Kentucky is one of 20 states with a severe shortage of dementia and Alzheimer's care specialists making it more difficult to get a diagnosis.

It is a crisis here, and one of the biggest reasons that we're seeing such an impact of Alzheimer's and dementia in Kentucky is because we're a gerontology desert.

It's called.

And so there are not enough medical professionals that are trained in serving the aging population.

We were really hoping for a national and federal legislation that would help fund that so that our caregivers could be either paid themselves or have additional support come in to help them, because the unpaid caregiver not only affects them, but it affects the person that they're living with.

Because if that person that's living with a disease is living with a very stressed out, isolated, anxious caregiver, they're not going to have the high quality of care that they need to live a quality life.