P0326 - Mental health evaluation of elderly people in primary health care

Abstract

Nowadays 16.7% of the portuguese population has more than 65 years old. The elderly accumulates successive losses, in particular, the loss of the work and the physical and mental vigour. Depression is considered the most common psychiatric illness in this population, being most of the times difficult to carry out its precocious diagnosis.

Objectives:

to proceed on the primary care health level to a tracing on mental health in the geriatric population; to detect also depressive syntomatology in elderly without diagnosed psychiatric pathology.

Methods:

Application of Tracing on Mental Health Scale (ER80) and of Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15) to a random group of consultation users from an urban health center with age ≥ 65 years.

Results:

/ Conclusions: In a total of 63 individuals, 50.8% were male, being the group between 70 and 75 years the most representative (34.9%), the majority were married (74.6%), with just four years of scholarity (46%) and retired (96.8%). In the analysis of the ER80, the mental disorder was detected in 22.2%, in 17.5% it was inconclusive due to data and in 4.8% questionnaires were excluded by the scale considers a falseness index (≥ 4). In the study of the GDS-15, a suspicion of depression (total ≥ 5) was verified in 49.2% and in 14.3% the result was inconclusive due to insufficient data. Results reveals that the general practitioner plays an important role in what regards to the precocious detection and primary prevention of psychiatric pathology in the elderly people, specially of the depressive syntomatology.