Abstract
Objectives
Late-life depression (LLD) is the most common mental disorder among the elderly, but its clinical features remain unclear, especially among older adults. We sought to investigate if age, sex and education could influence the severity or frequency of LLD symptoms.
Methods
We evaluated 639 community-dwelling individuals aged 75+ years in Caeté (MG), Brazil. We used the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview to diagnose major depression according to DSM-IV criteria and the GDS-15 to measure depression severity.
Results
Excluding 174 individuals diagnosed with dementia, 54 (11.6%) of the remaining 457 individuals were diagnosed with LLD; 77.8% of which were female. On average, these participants were aged 81.0 ± 4.8 years and had 2.7 ± 3.3 years of schooling. Symptom severity was not influenced by sociodemographic variables. Death/suicidal ideation was more frequent among men, while psychomotor disturbance was more present in women (p = 0.04 and p = 0.042). More educated individuals (≥ 4 years) also reported a higher frequency of psychomotor disturbance (p = 0.039).
Conclusions
Severity of depressive episode was not influenced by sociodemographic variables. Sex and educational level had a significant impact on symptom profiles.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the partnership from Instituto Hermes Pardini and Laboratório Geraldo Lustosa. We greatly thank Maria Ângela Dutra Ornellas for the local coordination of the operational arrangements. We are deeply grateful to the City Hall, the Municipal Health Department and the Retired and Pensioner Pavilion from Caeté (MG) for their continuous support to the Pietà study and also to all elderly participants and their families for the generous collaboration and engagement on the research project. We would also like to thank Fernando Henrique Pereira for the valuable contribution on the statistical analysis.