[Depressive symptoms in geriatrics-More than the geriatric depression scale].

Abstract

Background: Depression is a common but often overlooked problem in the care of older people. It impairs the quality of life, worsens the course of somatic diseases and causes high healthcare costs.

Objective: To investigate the prevalence of depressive symptoms in patients receiving acute geriatric treatment, taking gender-specific differences and correlations with cognitive and functional impairments into account.

Material and methods: Retrospective analysis of anonymized data from 345 patients who were treated in an acute geriatric inpatient ward at a German university hospital in 2019. The geriatric depression scale (GDS-15), the mini-mental status test (MMST), Barthel index and documented depression diagnoses at admission were recorded.

Results: Complete data were available for 286 patients and of these 36.8% showed noticeable depressive symptoms (GDS-15 > 5) but only 10.4% had a previous diagnosis of depression. There were no significant gender-specific differences. The MMST correlated negatively with the GDS-15 in women, while the Barthel Index showed no correlation.

Discussion: Depressive symptoms are common in geriatric settings. Gender differences may play a lesser role in older age. The lack of correlation between depressive symptoms and functional impairments but the partial correlation with cognitive impairments, points to the diagnostic challenge of age-related multimorbidity. The discrepancy between noticeable depressive symptoms and few documented diagnoses of depression indicates possible gaps in the prehospital detection and recording of depressive disorders.