Depression and frailty in an elderly population living in a rural area
International Journal of Development Research
Depression and frailty in an elderly population living in a rural area
Received 29th June, 2017; Received in revised form 04th July, 2017; Accepted 26th August, 2017; Published online 29th September, 2017
Copyright ©2017, Diana Cristina Buz Mainardi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Objectives: Determine the socio-demographical and health profile of the elderly population living in a county’s rural area; Verify this population’s frailty levels and depression symptoms’ prevalence. Method: A quantitative, descriptive-analytical approach was chosen. Data was collected through a questionnaire containing socio-demographical, health and life habits questions. Then the Edmonton Frail Scale and the Depressed Population Tracking Scale were used to measure the frailty and the depression symptoms’ presence. Results: 290 elderly subjects have filled out the survey, mostly female with ages from 60 to 70, although there were subjects with up to 100 years old. As for their marital situation, 64.1% were married, 25.6% were widowers. 57.6% of the subjects showed no frailty. Conclusions: The results showed that 30.6% of the subjects showed depression symptoms. 14,2% showed both depression symptoms and frailty. It was also shown that 4.5% of the male subjects showed depression symptoms and severe frailty.
