Allahyari Elahe
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Health, Social Determinants of Health Research Center, Birjand University of Medical Sciences, Birjand, Iran.
Biomedicine (Taipei). 2021 Dec 1;11(4):23-34. doi: 10.37796/2211-8039.1098. eCollection 2021.
The elderly population has extensively increased globally, so depression like a common problem in late life may convert to one of the economic, social, and health challenges of the 21st century. Due to the high cost of clinical diagnosis of depression, it is necessary to provide effective questionnaires like the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15) for screening. But, the measurement invariance of GDS-15 is still unknown in the general population. In our study, 1473 participants of all Iran's ethnic groups were asked to answer GDS-15 and demographic factors such as human settlements, employment, disease, marital status, age, gender, homebound, financial status, and ethnicity. Then, the lordif package in R 3.1.3 was used to assess differential item functioning (DIF) items that behave unevenly across demographic factors. Our findings reveal that women, homebound patients, poorer, and non-Persian mother tongue score classic psychological symptoms higher than peoples of the same depression score in other groups. Since, psychologists have to remove or replace these items before using this questionnaire for screening geriatric depression.
全球老年人口数量大幅增加，因此老年期常见的抑郁症可能会成为21世纪的经济、社会和健康挑战之一。由于抑郁症的临床诊断成本高昂，有必要提供像15项老年抑郁量表（GDS-15）这样的有效问卷进行筛查。但是，GDS-15在普通人群中的测量不变性仍然未知。在我们的研究中，1473名来自伊朗所有民族的参与者被要求回答GDS-15以及人口统计学因素，如居住情况、就业、疾病、婚姻状况、年龄、性别、居家情况、经济状况和种族。然后，使用R 3.1.3中的lordif包来评估在人口统计学因素上表现不均衡的差异项目功能（DIF）项目。我们的研究结果显示，女性、居家患者、贫困者以及母语非波斯语者在经典心理症状方面的得分高于其他组中具有相同抑郁得分的人群。因此，心理学家在使用该问卷筛查老年抑郁症之前必须删除或替换这些项目。
