A Study of Prevalence of Psychiatric Morbidity during Pandemic in Elderly Patients with Physical Comorbidity

ABSTRACT

Background: To the best of our knowledge, no article has linked geriatrics to physical illness and psychiatric morbidity in the Indian population during the COVID-19 pandemic. 25 The goal of this study is to assess the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and alcohol dependency as well as their association with demographic features among elderly patients who had physical comorbidity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Material(s) and Method(s) A cross-sectional hospital based study was conducted on 181 patients at Saveetha Medical College and Hospital (SMCH), Chennai, India between August 2020 to November 2020.The psychological assessment tools such as MMSE, GHQ-12, GDS-15, GAS, and CAGE were used to determine the cognitive impairment, depression status, anxiety, and alcohol dependency separately. All the above stated psychological assessment self-reported proforma were given to the patients and asked to answer the questions. SPSS version 25 was used for statistical analysis. Result(s) Mean age 73.1+/-5.3years with a range from 60 to 86 years and majority of the populations were male in gender (55.2%). Higher proportion of patients had the presence of systemic hypertension (63.5%), followed by diabetic (41.4%), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (43.6%) etc. The prevalence of psychological symptoms such as depression, anxiety, cognitive impairment and poor mental health were determined to 49.7%,45.9%,53.0% and 32.6% in the present study. The study exhibited the correlation of elderly study subjects with the following DM with cognitive impairment, COPD and alcoholism with anxiety individually;and CAD with mental health problems. Conclusion(s) The study recommends for more research reflect the psychological status of the geriatric population as well as to devise a specialised appropriate counselling intervention for elderly populations during such unavoidable pandemic situations in order to improve their quality of life. Copyright © 2022 Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications. All rights reserved.