Even moderately depressed seniors, the University of Michigan study finds, require far more hours of care than those without any symptoms of depression, regardless of other health problems they may have.
If depressed seniors' "informal" caregivers were paid the wages of a home health aide, the cost to society would be $9 billion a year, the researchers estimate. That puts depression second only to dementia in the national annual cost for informal caregiving, based on previous studies of the same data. And the findings illustrate the major impact of depression on both seniors and their loved ones.
The findings, which will be published in the May issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, are based on data from the U-M's Health and Retirement Study, a long-term survey of older Americans conducted by the U-M Institute for Social Research. The study's authors, from the U-M Health System's departments of Internal Medicine and Psychiatry and the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, analyzed data from 6,651 people over the age of 70 from around the nation. It's the first analysis of its kind.
In all, 18 percent of the seniors reported having had four to eight depressive symptoms in the last week on a standardized survey. Another 44 percent had one to three symptoms. These proportions are in line with previous estimates of depression's incidence among older people; about 1 to 5 percent are thought to have serious, major depression, while another 7 to 23 percent may have mild depression.
The survey showed that 38 percent of seniors who had many depressive symptoms, and 23 percent of those with a few symptoms, reported receiving informal care from family or friends -- but only 11 percent of those
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Contact: Kara Gavin
kegavin@umich.edu
734-764-2220
University of Michigan Health System
1-May-2004