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Age and Ageing Advance Access published online on November 10, 2009
Age and Ageing, doi:10.1093/ageing/afp187
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Geriatrics Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Systematic Review

Health status and risk for depression among the elderly: a meta-analysis of published literature

Huang Chang-Quan1,2, Zhang Xue-Mei1,*, Dong Bi-Rong1, Lu Zhen-Chan1, Yue Ji-Rong1 and Liu Qing-Xiu2

1 Department of Geriatrics, The West China Hospital of Sichuan University, Guoxuexiang 37 (610041), Chengdu, Sichuan, China
2 Department of Geriatrics, The Third Hospital of Mianyang, Mianyang, Sichuan, 621000, China

Address correspondence to: D. Bi-Rong. Tel: 15984628767. E-mail: birong_d{at}yahoo.cn

Objective: the goal of this study was to determine the relationship between health status, including self-rated health status and chronic disease, and risk for depression among the elderly.

Method: MEDLINE, EMBASE and The Cochrane Library Database were used to identify potential studies. The studies were classified into cross-sectional and longitudinal subsets. For each study, the numbers of the total participants, cases (for cross-sectional study) or incident cases (for longitudinal study) of depression in each health status group were extracted and entered into Review Manager 4.2. The quantitative meta-analysis of cross-sectional studies and that of longitudinal studies were performed, respectively. For prevalence and incidence rates of depression, odds risk and relative risk (RR) were calculated, respectively.

Results: the quantitative meta-analysis showed that, compared with the elderly without chronic disease, those with chronic disease had higher risk for depression (RR: 1.53, 95% confidence intervals (CI): 1.20–1.97). Compared with the elderly with good self-rated health, those with poor self-rated health had higher risk for depression (RR: 2.40, 95% CI: 1.94–2.97).

Conclusions: despite the methodological limitations of this meta-analysis, both poor self-rated health status and the presence of chronic disease are risk factors for depression among the elderly. In the elderly, poor self-reported health status appears to be more strongly associated with depression than the presence of chronic disease.

Keywords: health status, depression, risk, meta-analysis, elderly

* Zhang Xue-Mei is the co-first author.

Received 17 January 2009; accepted in revised form 8 July 2009.


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