Department of Legal Medicine, Psychiatry and Pathology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.
Centre for Biomedical Research in Mental Health (CIBERSAM), Spain.
Epidemiol Psychiatr Sci. 2020 Jul 29;29:e147. doi: 10.1017/S204579602000058X.
Depression in old age deserves special attention in view of the fact of progressive population ageing, because of the way in which depression and risk factors interact in this period of life and the particularly negative impact of late-life depression on health and quality of life. This editorial aims to provide some insight into longitudinal aspects of depression in old age. Depression may follow varying trajectories (e.g. episode emergence, recurrence) across the lifespan. Late-life depression is not an exception. A symptom-based approach is presented as an appropriate research method to study the predictors and course of affective syndromes in old age. Findings from our studies on depressive symptom trajectories in old age revealed that participants with a course of unremitting elevated symptoms showed the highest levels of loneliness across the trajectory groups and that participants with subclinical symptoms also showed higher levels of loneliness than their counterparts with a minimal-symptom course trajectory. This highlights the need to address loneliness as a way of dealing with depression in old age.
鉴于人口老龄化的事实，老年抑郁症值得特别关注，因为在这个生命阶段，抑郁症和风险因素相互作用的方式以及老年抑郁症对健康和生活质量的特别负面影响。本社论旨在提供一些关于老年抑郁症纵向方面的见解。抑郁症可能在整个生命周期中呈现不同的轨迹（例如发作出现、复发）。老年抑郁症也不例外。基于症状的方法被提出作为一种合适的研究方法，用于研究老年期情感综合征的预测因素和病程。我们对老年抑郁症状轨迹的研究结果表明，在整个轨迹组中，持续升高症状的患者表现出最高水平的孤独感，而亚临床症状的患者也比其具有最小症状轨迹的患者表现出更高水平的孤独感。这凸显了需要将孤独感作为治疗老年抑郁症的一种方式。
