Late life depression

BACKGROUND: Max Reger was an organist, university teacher and composer whose life, illnesses, death and dying are not or hardly known to many. OBJECTIVES: Which illnesses determined Reger's life and did his lifestyle and illnesses influence his compositional work? Could his early death have been avoided? From today's point of view, could modern intensive care medicine have helped him? MATERIAL AND METHODS: A detailed analysis of Reger's diseases was performed using scientific databases (medline, pubmed)...

OBJECTIVES: Mental and cognitive health is crucial to ensure well-being in older age. However, prolonged periods of stress, grief, and bereavement might compromise mental health balance, leading to profound changes. This study investigated the sex-stratified associations between midlife bereavement experiences (e.g. sibling loss, spousal loss, and multiple losses) and late-life depression (LLD) and cognitive impairment. METHOD: Linked data from the Swedish Level-of-Living Survey and the Swedish Panel Study of Living Conditions of the Oldest Old (SWEOLD) were used...

INTRODUCTION: Epilepsy is the third most common neurological disorder in elderly people. Patients with epilepsy (PWEs) are more likely to have comorbidities. Social support is very important for PWEs. However, there are many gaps in the research on social support in older PWEs, especially the correlation between social support and comorbidities. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted in three hospitals in China. Social support was assessed using the Social Support Rate Scale...

For Black students in the United States, attending schools with a higher proportion of White students is associated with worse mental and physical health outcomes in adolescence/early adulthood. No prior studies evaluate K-12 school racial composition and later-life mental health. In a cohort of Black adults ages 50+ in Northern California who retrospectively self-reported school racial composition for grades 1, 6, 9, and 12, we assessed the association between attending a school with mostly Black students vs...

OBJECTIVE: While the association between depression and frailty in the elderly population has been investigated, the psychological factors that mediate such a relationship remain unknown. The identification of psychological factors in interventions for depression treatment in the elderly may assist in the treatment and care. We aimed to explore the mediating effects of anger, anxiety, and resilience on the link between frailty and depression symptoms in patients with late-life depression...

OBJECTIVES: Few studies have examined the impact of late-life depression trajectories on specific domains of cognitive function. This study aims to delineate how different depressive symptom trajectories specifically affect cognitive function in older adults. DESIGN: Prospective longitudinal cohort study. SETTING: Australia and the United States of America. PARTICIPANTS: In total, 11,035 community-dwelling older adults with a mean age of 75 years...

IMPORTANCE: Physical diseases co-occur with late-life depression (LLD). The influence of physical diseases and the subjective perception of physical health (PPH) on treatment outcome in LLD, however, is not well understood. OBJECTIVE: To assess the association of physical diseases and PPH with the outcomes of 2 different types of psychotherapy in LLD. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: This post hoc secondary analysis of a multicenter, observer-blinded, controlled, parallel-group randomized clinical trial assessed participants 60 years or older with moderate to severe depression recruited at 7 psychiatric-psychotherapeutic outpatient trial sites in Germany from October 1, 2018, to November 11, 2020...

Introduction  Hearing impairment is one of the main disorders that can interfere with the development of speech and language. In an individual, it can cause significant communication difficulties, social isolation, negative feelings, and depressive disorders. The hearing aids (HAs) and cochlear implant (CI) are options for profound and severe hearing loss, and the CI can be indicated for individuals who do not obtain benefits from HAs. Objective  To evaluate the quality of life of individuals who underwent sequential bilateral CIs with a long surgical interval between procedures...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a common degenerative dementia, but research on caregiver experiences in late stages is lacking. This study aimed to investigate the caregiving experience in moderate-advanced DLB to identify opportunities for improving care and support. METHODS: Dyads of individuals with moderate-advanced DLB and their primary informal caregivers were recruited from specialty clinics, advocacy organizations, and research registries...

BACKGROUND: Better understanding apathy in late-life depression (LLD) would help predicting poor prognosis of the disease such as dementia. Actimetry provides an objective and ecological measure of apathy from patients' daily motor activity. We aimed to determine if patterns of motor activity were associated with apathy and brain connectivity in networks underlying goal-directed behaviors. METHODS: Resting-state functional MRI and diffusion MRI were collected from 38 non-demented LLD subjects...

Sexual health concerns are one of the most common late effects facing hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) survivors. The current study tested whether self-reported depression and anxiety symptoms before transplant were associated with embedded items assessing two specific areas of sexual health-sexual interest and sexual satisfaction-one year post-HSCT. Of the 158 study participants, 41% were diagnosed with a plasma cell disorder (n = 60) and most received autologous transplantation (n = 128; 81%)...

Late-life depression is a common pathology. The diagnosis can be difficult to make, due to intricacy of comorbidities, aging and treatments. The presentation is frequently atypical, with a high prevalence of somatic complaints. Depression is, in fact, underdiagnosed in this population and, when it is, poorly managed. This pathology constitutes a real public health problem due to impairment of functioning and quality of life, increase of comorbidities, use of health care and overall mortality, particularly by suicide...

BACKGROUND: Treatment resistant depression (TRD) is a subset of major depressive disorder (MDD) in which symptoms do not respond to front line therapies. In older adults, the assessment and treatment of TRD is complicated by psychosocial risk factors unique to this population, as well as a relative paucity of research. METHODS: Narrative review aimed at (1) defining TRLLD for clinical practice and research; (2) describing psychosocial risk factors; (3) reviewing psychological and non-pharmacological treatments; (4) discussing the role of clinical phenotyping for personalized treatment; and (5) outlining research priorities...

This study aims to evaluate the effects of Omaha System framework interventions on quality of life, emotional well-being, and sleep quality in 507 mid to late-stage lung cancer patients. Retrospectively, we compared data of 294 patients receiving conventional care (conventional group) with 213 patients undergoing Omaha System interventions (intervention group) from January 2019 to January 2023. Key indicators included quality of life (FACT-L), anxiety (SAS), depression (SDS), sleep quality (PSQI), hope (HHS), and dignity (PDI)...

Major depression is an established risk factor for subsequent dementia, and depression in late life may also represent a prodromal state of dementia. Considering current challenges in the clinical development of disease modifying therapies for dementia, the focus of research is shifting towards prevention and modification of risk factors to alter the neurodegenerative disease trajectory. Understanding mechanistic commonalities underlying affective symptoms and cognitive decline may reveal biomarkers to aid early identification of those at risk of progressing to dementia during the preclinical phase of disease, thus allowing for timely intervention...

BACKGROUND: Low socioeconomic status (SES) is a well-recognized risk factor for depression. However, the relationship between the timing of exposure to disadvantaged SES in childhood and depression in adolescence remains to be explored. We examined the differential influence of SES in early childhood, late childhood and adolescence on adolescent depression by modeling life course models. METHODS: We used longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (N = 2245)...

BACKGROUND: Assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have become the main treatment for infertility. ART treatment can be a stressful life event for infertile females. Whether there is an association between ARTs and postpartum depressive symptoms (PDS) has not been established. METHODS: PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, and CNKI were searched. The pooled outcome was the difference in incidence of PDS within 1 year postpartum between ARTs and the spontaneous pregnancy group...

BACKGROUND: Depression is a global health priority. Maintaining and delaying depressive symptoms in older adults is a key to healthy aging. This study aimed to identify depressive symptom trajectories, predictors and mortality, while also exploring the relationship between air quality and depressive symptoms in older adults in the Hong Kong community over 14 years. METHODS: This study is a longitudinal study in Hong Kong. The target population was community-dwelling older adults over age 65...

BACKGROUND: Suicide is one of the most lethal complications of late-life depression (LLD), and habenular dysfunction may be involved in depression-related suicidality and may serve as a potential target for alleviating suicidal ideation. This study aimed to investigate abnormal functional connectivity of the habenula in LLD patients with suicidal ideation. METHODS: One hundred twenty-seven patients with LLD (51 with suicidal ideation (LLD-S) and 76 without suicidal ideation (LLD-NS)) and 75 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited...

Identifying biomarkers is essential to obtain the optimal therapeutic benefit while treating patients with late-life depression (LLD). We compare LLD patients with healthy controls (HC) using resting-state functional magnetic resonance and diffusion tensor imaging data to identify neuroimaging biomarkers that may be potentially associated with the underlying pathophysiology of LLD. We implement a Bayesian multimodal local false discovery rate approach for functional connectivity, borrowing strength from structural connectivity to identify disrupted functional connectivity of LLD compared to HC...