STUDY OF DEPRESSION AMONG ELDERLY WITH CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE

Abstract

Congestive heart failure is one of the commonest geriatric syndromes that rs associated with several comorbidities. One ofthe most important of these is depression, which has a direct relation to increased mortality among those patients. it is usually underdiagnosed and undertreated. The presence of depression together with progression of hear1 failure symptoms (more congestion - poor NYHA class - low ejection fraction and the inability to have a good physical performance) cause patients with CHF to led poor quality of life with subsequent failure of management, including its ultimate aim to achieve better quality of life. As we were concerned with those previous aspects. We studied 60 elderly with CHF diagnosed by Framingham Criteria. We applied GDS-15 for screening of depression with a cut-off point :2':5. 43 out of60 patients (71.6%) were found to be depressed and this is considered a high prevalence if compared to other studies. Then we applied GDS-30 for those depressed patients to assess severity of depression. 5 out of 43 patients (11.9%) were not depressed according to GDS-30 with a score (0-10), 34 (78.6%) have mild depression with a score (11-20) and only 4 patients (9.5%) have sever depression with a score (>20). So as regard severity of depression, mild depression was the more prevalent form among the studied group.