Age-Differences in Depressive Symptoms and Screening in Late Life

ABSTRACT

Depression is a common psychiatric disorder, but accurate recognition of depression is somewhat difficult because of different symptom presentation by age. The consequence of not recognizing to depression is that clinically significant and potentially treatable depression might be overlooked, misdiagnosed, and mistreated in depressive patients. The overlap of somatic symptoms of depression and physical illness and minimal expression of sadness is common in old age. Because of that reasons, alternative approach to identifying depression should be provided by proper screening instruments.