Screening Depression Among Elderly in a City of Southeast Asia.
BACKGROUND
Changing family structure (Joint to Nuclear), increased life expectancy above 60 years of age, generation and communication gap, financial dependency on children leads to conflict among family members. This may sometime lead to old age home settlement of elderly people. All these condition leads to isolation and insecurity among elderly people and this condition affect the mental status of elderly people which may sometime lead to depression among Old Age Homes residents and family living elderly people.


OBJECTIVE
To study the prevalence of depression and diagnosed systemic morbidities among elderly people. To study the predictors of depression among study subjects.


METHODS
A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among elderly people (age ≥60 years) residing in old age homes (OAHs) and in community/families in Lucknow, India. Multistage sampling technique was used to include required sample of subjects from the community and for OAHs all the elderly people living in OAHs were included. Geriatric depression scale was used to screen depression.


RESULTS
Depression was 27.7% among elderly people residing in OAHs while it was 15.6% those residing at their own homes. In community most frequent morbidity was hypertension (17.7%) while 41.1% elderly people had no diagnosed morbidity. In OAHs out of total the musculoskeletal morbidity (33.7%) was most frequent and 18.8% had no diagnosed morbidity. On multivariate analysis financial dependency and education were found to be statistically significant.


CONCLUSIONS
Depression was more common among elderly living in Old Age Homes as compare to those living in community. Hypertension, musculoskeletal morbidities and eye related morbidities were most frequent diagnosed morbidities. Financial Dependency & Education were found to be primary predictors of depression.
Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, Hind Institute of Medical Sciences , Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, India .
Abhishek
A
Gupta
Professor, Department of Community Medicine & Public Health, K.G. Medical University , UP, Lucknow, India .
Uday
U
Mohan
Associate Professor, Department of Community Medicine & Public Health, K.G. Medical University , UP, Lucknow, India .
Shivendra Kumar
SK
Singh
Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine & Public Health, K.G. Medical University , UP, Lucknow, India .
Manish K
MK
Manar
Professor, Department of Geriatric Mental Health, K.G. Medical University , UP, Lucknow, India .
Sarvada Chandra
SC
Tiwari
Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine & Public Health, K.G. Medical University , UP, Lucknow, India .
Vijay Kumar
VK
Singh
Education; Financial dependency; Old age home