Depressive symptoms in the very elderly—their prevalence and significance

✍ Scribed by Dr. Deborah M. Girling; Felicia A. Huppert; Carol Brayne; Eugene S. Paykel; Caroline Gill; Diane Mathewson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 690 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6230
• DOI: 10.1002/gps.930100609

✦ Synopsis

A community sample of 1173 very elderly people (aged over 77) was interviewed by trained lay interviewers using a structured interview, including questions relating to emotional and physical health and social circumstances and the Mini-Mental State Examination. Depressive symptoms such as loss of energy and feelings of tension and irritability were found frequently. High scores for depressive symptoms were associated with female sex, poor subjective physical health, loneliness and use of statutory services. Depressive symptom score was not found to be associated with age. Although only 6% of the sample described feeling depressed most of the time, 21% of respondents admitted that they sometimes felt that life was not worth living.

KEY w o m s a g e d ; depression; epidemiology

Depression is a relatively common and debilitating problem in the elderly which is associated with a considerable increase in mortality, even after controlling for physical illness (Murphy, 1983;Baldwin and Jolley, 1986). There have been a number of community surveys of depression in old age which have used different methodologies. Studies using DSM-111-R criteria (Blazer and Williams, 1980; Weissman et al., 1985) have tended to produce prevalence rates for major depressive disorder of the order of 1-3% lower than that found in younger populations. In contrast, studies using instruments