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Published on: February 22, 2018
Health status and risk for depression among the elderly: a meta-analysis of published literature
Huang Chang-Quan1, Zhang Xue-Mei, Dong Bi-Rong
1Department of Geriatrics, The West China Hospital of Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.
Objective:
the goal of this study was to determine the relationship between health status, including self-rated health status and chronic disease, and risk for depression among the elderly.
Method:
MEDLINE, EMBASE and The Cochrane Library Database were used to identify potential studies. The studies were classified into cross-sectional and longitudinal subsets. For each study, the numbers of the total participants, cases (for cross-sectional study) or incident cases (for longitudinal study) of depression in each health status group were extracted and entered into Review Manager 4.2. The quantitative meta-analysis of cross-sectional studies and that of longitudinal studies were performed, respectively. For prevalence and incidence rates of depression, odds risk and relative risk (RR) were calculated, respectively.
Results:
the quantitative meta-analysis showed that, compared with the elderly without chronic disease, those with chronic disease had higher risk for depression (RR: 1.53, 95% confidence intervals (CI): 1.20-1.97). Compared with the elderly with good self-rated health, those with poor self-rated health had higher risk for depression (RR: 2.40, 95% CI: 1.94-2.97).
Conclusions:
despite the methodological limitations of this meta-analysis, both poor self-rated health status and the presence of chronic disease are risk factors for depression among the elderly. In the elderly, poor self-reported health status appears to be more strongly associated with depression than the presence of chronic disease.
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