An investigation of influencing factors for depressive disorder in 1 000 retired cadres and people

Fengmei XING; Qingwen WU; Wei ZHU; Dongmei SUN; Xifeng TIAN; Jianmin LI

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND:

Geriatric depressive disorder is a common psychological disorder in elderly people, and it can lead to the decline of various organic functions, and it also does great harm to elderly people and their family.

OBJECTIVE:

To investigate the influencing factors of depressive disorder in retired cadres and people, so as to provide basic evidence for enhancing the mental nursing in retired cadres and people and reducing the prevalence of geriatric depressive disorder.

DESIGN:

A sampling survey.

SETTING:

Department of Nursing, North China Coal Medical College.

PARTICIPANTS:

Between August and December 2002, 1 000 retired cadres and people living in the urban area of Tangshan city were investigated. There were 574 males and 426 females, aged from 60-88 years, the average age was 67.04 years, 851 of them were married, 10 were divorced and 139 had lost their spouses the educational level was primary school and below in 159 cases, junior middle school in 362 cases, senior middle school in 280 cases, university and above in 199 cases.

METHODS:

The elderly people were investigated with the geriatric depression scale (GDS) and individual general information inventory by means of family visit. The investigative purpose and methods were introduced to the subjects before the investigation, and they all signed the informed consent, the form of without recording name was used. The strictly trained investigators were qualified by examination, which ensured the concordance of the investigative results. The pretesting was performed before the investigation to detect whether there were words,sentencesand items hard to understand, so as to avoid the information bias. The questionnaires were filled by the elderly people themselves or by the investigator if there was any difficulty for the elderly people in writing according to the their choice after reading the questions for them.in retired cadres and people of different age, gender and educational levelferent marriage status.

RESULTS:

Totally 1 000 questionnaires were sent out, and 1 000 valid der was obviously higher in females than in males (27.0%, 18.6%, P ＜ 0.05).ple with the educational level of primary school and below, junior middle school, senior middle school, university and above were 33.9%, 22.1%,20.0%, 16.1% respectively, and it was decreased with the elevation of emarkedly higher in retired people than in retired cadres (25.4%, 13.6%,higher than in those having or had lost spouse (50.0%, 21.2%, 26.6%, P ＜ 0.05).

CONCLUSION:

The prevalence of depressive disorder is higher in retired cadres and people. More attentions should be given to the mental health care and social support of retired cadres and people, especially for the divorced ones.