Regular Research ArticlesDepression Predicts Mortality in the Young Old, but Not in the Oldest Old: Results From the Berlin Aging Study
Section snippets
Participants and Procedure
We used data from the interdisciplinary Berlin Aging Study (BASE).24 The cross-sectional BASE sample at T1 (N = 516; M = 84.92 years, SD: 8.66, range: 70–103) was stratified by age and gender with 43 men and 43 women in each of six different age brackets (70–74, 75–79, 80–84, 85–89, 90–94, and 95+ years; born between 1887 and 1922). To obtain this sample, a total of 1,908 individuals, randomly drawn from the Berlin, Germany, City Registry, were approached for participation. Of those, 516
RESULTS
Demographic characteristics of the sample are shown in Table 1. Of the 243 young-old participants, 56 (23%) were diagnosed with depression, whereas among the oldest old, 72 (28%) were diagnosed with depression (p >0.10). Both depression diagnosis and being older than age 85 were associated with a larger number of deaths, χ2 (1, N = 496) = 8.14, p = 0.004 and χ2 (1, N = 496) = 81.05, p = 0.000, respectively.
Overall, depressed participants were more often female than nondepressed participants, χ2
DISCUSSION
Consistent with the majority of studies in the literature,6, 7, 8, 9, 10 we found an increased mortality risk for clinically diagnosed depression in older adults aged 70–84 years, which held beyond the effects of age, gender, and the presence of dementia, cardiovascular, and other somatic diseases. The risk was sizable and amounted to a 3-year mortality difference, on average, between older adults who suffered from depression and those who did not. At the same time, we did not find this effect
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This study was conducted in the context of the Berlin, Germany, Aging Study (BASE), which was financially supported by two German Federal Departments: the Department of Research and Technology (13 TA 011: 1988–1991) and the Department of Family and Senior Citizens (1991–1998). Since 1999, BASE has been funded by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany, where the study is located. Members of the Steering Committee are P. B. Baltes and J. Smith (psychology), K. U. Mayer (sociology), E. Steinhagen-Thiessen and M. Borchelt (internal medicine and geriatrics), and H. Helmchen and F. Reischies (psychiatry). Field research was coordinated at various phases by R. Nuthmann, M. Neher, and K. Fröhlich. Michael A. Rapp and Denis Gerstorf are Junior Fellows in the Max Planck International Research Network on Aging MaxnetAging. Parts of this article were prepared while Denis Gerstorf was at the Department of Psychology, University of Virginia on a research fellowship awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).