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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Depression symptoms in late life assessed using the EURO-D scale
— effect of age, gender and marital status in 14 European centres | | Author(s) | M J Prince, A T F Beekman, D J H Deeg |
| Journal title | The British Journal of Psychiatry, vol 174, April 1999 |
| Pages | pp 339-345 |
| Keywords | Depression ; Symptoms ; Age groups [elderly] ; Social characteristics [elderly] ; Marital status ; Measurement ; Research Reviews ; Europe. |
| Annotation | Data from surveys involving 21,724 subjects aged _65 years were analysed using a harmonised depression symptom scale, the EURO-D. The authors tested for the effects of centre, age, gender and marital status on EURO-D scale. Between-centre variance was partitioned according to centre characteristics: region, religion, and survey instrument used. EURO-D scores tended to increase with age, women scored higher than men, and widowed and separated subjects scored higher than others. The EURO-D scale could be reduced into two factors: affective suffering, responsible for the gender difference; and motivation, accounting for the positive association with age. Large between-centre differences in depression symptoms were not explained by demography or by the depression measure used in the survey. Consistent, small effects of age, gender and marital status were observed across Europe. Depression may be over-diagnosed in older people, because of an increase in lack of motivation that may be affectively neutral, and is possibly linked to cognitive decline. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-990427219 A |
| Classmark | ENR: CT: BB: F: SLM: 3R: 3A:6KC: 74 |
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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