Physical illness and brain dysfunction may explain the high prevalence of minor depression and depressive symptoms in older adults despite a low prevalence of major depression.
May warrant attention to minor depression amid physical illness in older adults; leaves open causal validation in prospective studies.
The main subject of this survey is the discrepancy between the low prevalence of major depression in old age and the high prevalence of minor depression and depressive symptoms, as well as the high incidence of late suicide.It is tentatively explained by the emergence of a new vulnerability to depression, in which physical illness and brain dysfunction gain in importance over genetic and/or personality factors.
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Cécile Ernst (1997) studied this question.
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