Prevalence of depressive and anxiety symptoms in very old population compared to old population

Introduction. The number of old people is increasing fast in both developed and underdeveloped countries. Both depression and anxiety have high prevalence in the old age group. There are some conflicting reports regarding the prevalence of depression and anxiety across separate older age groups. The purpose of our study is to compare the prevalence of depression and anxiety in the old age group with very old age group. Objectives. We compared the prevalence of depression and anxiety in two groups of old people, the first one aged 60-79 years and the second one with aged ≥80 years. Methods. We applied the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) to 82 of people aged ≥60 years. HADS is a self-rating scale with 14 items, 7 attributed to depression and 7 to anxiety symptoms (27). On each item, the patient can score from 0 to 3, meaning that a person can score between 0 and 21 for either anxiety or depression; the cut-off point is ≥ 8 for anxiety or depression. Then we compared with chi-square the differences in prevalence of depression and anxiety in the two age groups. Results. From the total number of very old, 83.33% experienced depression compared to 42.85% from their younger counterpart. A statistically significant higher percent from the very old compared to the old people experienced depression: OR=1.309, CI=1.066-1.609, p=.005. From the total number of the old patients, a number of 71.4% presented anxiety compared to 58.3% from the very old age group, without statistically significant differences between the two groups: OR=.686, CI=.319-1.474, p=.498. Conclusions. Depression and anxiety are present with very high rates of prevalence in the old age patients. Still, there is an increase in risk for depression in the very old age group. More research for identifying risk and protective factors in different segments of the old age people are necessary for both depression and anxiety.