Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 27, 1991 TAG: 9102270411
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Short
The researchers who conducted the study estimated that as many as 450,000 elderly men and women in nursing homes were severely depressed, but that the condition was undiagnosed in 80 percent of them.
The study, which is being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that patients who were depressed had a 59 percent greater chance of dying over the year.
"The situation is a tragedy, because three-quarters of the depressed patients in nursing homes can be cured of their depression," said Dr. Barry Rovner, a specialist in geriatric psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who conducted the study.
Earlier studies have found high rates of depression among residents of nursing homes. But this is the first one to track nursing-home patients diagnosed with depression over a period to show the effect on mortality.
In Rovner's study, 454 patients being admitted to nursing homes in Baltimore were assessed by psychiatrists. Of these, 13 percent had severe depression, and another 18 percent had some symptoms of depression. But physicians at the nursing homes made the diagnosis of depression in only 14 percent of these cases.
In addition, two-thirds of the patients were diagnosed by the research psychiatrists as having dementia, mainly due to Alzheimer's disease.
by CNB