Symptoms of depression in the oldest old: a longitudinal study

This study examined depressive symptoms in a population-based, longitudinal sample of people aged 80 and older to determine initial prevalence of depressive symptoms and changes over time. Depressive symptomatology was assessed with the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression scale (CES-D). The sample was drawn from the OCTO-Twin study, which examined 702 Swedish twins over age 80 in which both members of the pair were still surviving. For the present study, one member of each twin pair was randomly selected, resulting in a sample of 351. A comprehensive biobehavioral assessment was conducted at three time points over 4 years. Depressive symptoms were initially relatively low and decreased significantly between Wave 1 and Wave 2. At Wave 3, depressive symptoms increased slightly but not significantly. Participants who received a dementia diagnosis at some point in the study did not differ significantly on initial CES-D scores when compared to those participants who never received such a diagnosis. Lack of well-being, as opposed to negative affect, was the biggest contributor to the overall depression score at each of the three waves of measurement. Predictors of negative affect for this sample included activities of daily living, subjective health, and performance on the cognitive test, block design. None of these predictors were significant for lack of well-being.