MedTrace Logo

Depression and Increased Health Services Utilization Among Elderly Primary Care Patients

NCT00279526 · Status: COMPLETED · Type: OBSERVATIONAL · Enrollment: 450

Last updated 2007-05-25

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

The increase in life expectancy in the 21st century has resulted in a major growth in the prevalence of age-related diseases and conditions. Depression has been found to be the most prevalent among the various mental disorders in later life. It was emphasized that depression in the elderly is a persistent or recurrent disorder resulting from psychosocial stress or physiologic effects of disease and can lead to disability, cognitive impairments, intensified symptoms of other medical conditions and increased utilization of health care services. Due to the rapidly aging population, depression is a serious public health concern that has a great impact on quality of life and may lay a considerable burden on the health care systems. However depression among the elderly may prove to be hard to diagnose since in aged persons depressive symptoms are often masked by somatic complaints or by cognitive impairments. Consequently depression is often under diagnosed and the patients continue to visit constantly the nurse or the physician without getting an adequate answer to their problem. For that reason over utilization of health care services may be an indicator to the presence of undiagnosed depression. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between socio-demographic variables, high primary care utilization and depressive symptomatology among aged patients.

Conditions

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Soroka University Medical Center

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Yan Press, MD · Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Eligibility

Min Age
65 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2006-04-30
Completion
2006-12-31

Countries

  • Israel

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT00279526 on ClinicalTrials.gov