Brief ReportGeneralized Anxiety Disorder in Late Life: Lifetime Course and Comorbidity With Major Depressive Disorder
Section snippets
METHODS
To examine the characteristics of GAD in elderly persons seeking mental health treatment (regardless of whether subjects had comorbid MDD or other diagnoses), we evaluated data from all recent studies that recruited subjects with GAD. The studies ran concurrently at the University of Pittsburgh Intervention Research Center for the study of Late-life Mood Disorders (IRC/LLMD); two studies were of anxiety disorders, and one was of MDD. Subjects were recruited via radio and newspaper
RESULTS
A total of 103 subjects with GAD were examined in this analysis, 46 from the GAD-only group and 57 from the MDD-with-GAD group. Table 1 shows subjects' baseline characteristics. The most common lifetime comorbidities were panic disorder (N=24), dysthymic disorder (N=17), specific phobia (N=14), social phobia (N=10), agoraphobia without panic disorder (N=7), and alcohol abuse or dependence (N=6).
We evaluated age at first onset of GAD; this was obtainable for all but one subject (who had
DISCUSSION
To our knowledge, this is the first report to provide a lifetime perspective on the course and comorbidity of GAD. In this evaluation of treatment-seeking elderly patients, GAD was typically chronic and could be delineated from MDD. Our data did not support our hypothesis that disability, chronic medical illness, and cognitive impairment were more common in late-onset than early-onset cases. Our negative findings are consistent with other work;9 however, our negative findings may have been due
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revised March 26, 2004
This work was supported by NIMH grants K23 MH64196, P30 MH 52247, K01 MH01613, R37 MH43832, R01 MH37869, and T32 MH19986.