Fragilidad y depresión en la persona anciana

Abstract

Objective: To explore the connection between frailty and depression in elders. It will be necessary to determine the prevalence of frailty together with depression, to study the confl uence of specifi c characteristics of frailty and depressive illness and examine the association between both syndromes. Methods: We undertook a research between November 2013 and February 2014 using the keywords “depression”, “depressive symptoms” and (“&”, “And”) “Frail elderly”, “Frailty” in the following data bases: Embase, PUBMED, Cinahl, Scopus, PsycInfo and Cuiden Results: Twenty-three studies met the inclusion criteria. It was found that the prevalence of frailty in older adults range from 3.8% to 41.2% for those living in the community, and from 53.7% to 68.8% in case of institutionalization. When the pre-frail stage was valued the percentages were just the opposite. The confl uence of frailty and depression is high in elders living in the community, and range from 6.7% to 36.8% for those in pre-frail stage and from 7.4% to 53.8% in frail older people. Data show coincidence between the frailty síndrome and depression, though they are different entities. Cohort studies suggest that depression is a very important risk factor for the development of frailty in older adults, and only one study suggest that frailty could be a predictor of depression. Conclusions: New and longer studies are needed in order to define more accurately the conection between these two syndromes