Deprssion In Elderly Patients Attending Primary Health Care Clinics In Baghdad City

الملخص EN

Background : There is currently a world-wide increase in the elderly population, resulting in more elderly people utilizing health care system.

De-pression is the most common psychiatric disorder amongst this group, and its detection and treatment is a matter of skill.

Primary care clinics play a crucial role in this issue.

The health providers must be armed with education, knowledge, and equipped by simple, easily answered, comprehensible, and time saving tools to help in detection such disorder.

Objectives : To determine the prevalence of depression among elderly pa-tents attending primary health clinics in Baghdad and its correlation with some sociodemographic variables such as gender, age group, marital status, economic status, and physical conditions .

Methods : This is a cross-sectional study of the prevalence of depression in randomly selected sample of 208 elderly patients aged 60 years and above who attended two health care clinics in Baghdad, from October 4 .

2002 to March 12, 2003.

The Geriatric Depression Scale - Short Form (GDS-15) and a semi-structured interview based on "ICD-10" criteria were applied after screen-ing the patients for cognitive impairment using the Mini Mental State Ex-amination (MMSE) and excluding those who scored less than 23 on this scale .

Results : 208 elderly patients (115 females and 93 males) with age range from 60-90 years were studied.

The mean age ± standard deviation was 65.5 ± 6.6 and the prevalence of depression was 38.9%.

Statistical analysis showed that age, gender, economic, marital and physical statuses were significantly associated with depression.

Conclusion : The study shows that more than one third of the primary health care elderly patients had significant depression.

None of them were previously identified by the primary health care physicians, which may have been due to lack of psychiatric training.