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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Prevalence of depression in older patients consulting their general practitioner in the Netherlands | | Author(s) | Els Licht-Strunk, Koen G van der Kooij, Digna J F van Schaik |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 20, no 11, November 2005 |
| Pages | pp 1013-1019 |
| Source | http://www.interscience.wiley.com |
| Keywords | Depression ; Evaluation ; Consultation ; Attitude ; General practitioners ; Netherlands. |
| Annotation | Depression in older general practice attendees is a very common health problem. As part of the West Friesland Study, 5,608 GP attendees aged 55+ filled in the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15) as a screening for depression response (62%). Of those screened positive by the GDS-15, 846 (77.5%) were interviewed using the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD). A random sample of 102 scoring below the threshold of the GDS-15 were interviewed to estimate the proportion of false negatives. Major depression was prevalent in 13.7% and minor depression in 10.2% of the patients. Depressed patients were older, more often female, and lived more often in urban areas. Patients with major depression were younger, and more often female than those with a minor depression. Only 22.9% of the patients with a major depression were treated with antidepressants. Further research should focus on identifying those groups of patients with high risk of persistence of depression, enabling limited resources to be used for those most urgently needing treatment. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-060106213 A |
| Classmark | ENR: 4C: LK6: DP: QT6: 76H |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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