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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Correlates of agitation and depression in nursing home residents with dementia | | Author(s) | Tomislav Majic, Jan P Pluta, Thomas Mell |
| Journal title | International Psychogeriatrics, vol 24, no 11, November 2012 |
| Pages | pp 1779-1789 |
| Source | www.journals.cambridge.org/ipg |
| Keywords | Aggression ; Depression ; Dementia ; Residents [care homes] ; Nursing homes ; Correlation ; Germany. |
| Annotation | The authors investigated the relationship between dementia severity, age, gender, and prescription of psychotropics, and syndromes of agitation and depression in a sample of nursing home residents with dementia. The study was part of the Leuchtturm Projekt Demenz, a service research programme on dementia funded by the German Federal Ministry of Health. The Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory (CMAI) was administered to residents with dementia (N = 304) of 18 nursing homes in Berlin. Agitation symptoms were clustered using factorial analysis. Depression was estimated using the Dementia Mood Assessment Scale (DMAS). Dementia severity was assessed categorically using predefined cut-off scores derived from the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). The relationship between agitation and its sub-syndromes, depression, and dementia severity was calculated using chi squared statistics. Linear regression analyses were used to calculate the effect of dementia severity and psychotropic prescriptions on agitation and depression, controlling for age and gender. Increasing stages of dementia severity were associated with higher risk for physically aggressive (p < 0.001) and non-aggressive (p < 0.01) behaviours, verbally agitated behaviour (p < 0.05) and depression (p < 0.001). Depressive symptoms were associated with physically aggressive (p < 0.001) and verbally agitated (p < 0.05) behaviours, beyond the effects of dementia severity. Prescription of antipsychotics was correlated with depression and all agitation sub-syndromes except hiding and hoarding. Dementia severity is a predictor for agitation and depression. Beyond that, depression increased with dementia severity, and the severity of depression was associated with both physically and verbally aggressive behaviours, indicating that in advanced stages of dementia, depression in some patients might underlie aggressive behaviour. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-121026112 A |
| Classmark | EPB: ENR: EA: KX: LHB: 49: 767 |
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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