A associação da depressão com as habilidades cognitivas de idosos

Abstract

The growth of the elderly population in Brazil occurs at an accelerated rate, resulting in the need to improve the living conditions of the elderly. I agree with the scope of mental health, in which few Brazilian studies exist on dementia, it is known that dementia processes are related to the drop in quality of life Analyzing the difficulties in correctly diagnosing dementia due not only to the complexity of the human brain but also of the several factors that influence, the study of the association of depression with the results of the instruments used to measure intelligence in adults gains importance. This is because depression has cognitive impairments in common with the pathology. The general objective of this work is to verify if there is an association between the results found in the abbreviated form of the WAIS-III psychometric test with depression. Thus, a database was used whose sample consisted of 168 participants of both sexes aged 60 years or over, selected for convenience. The statistical methodology includes tests of the relationship between the variables two by two, test such as t, Anova and the Chi-square test, in addition to normal and logistic regression models. In general, the study pointed to the existence of an association between depression and the results obtained in the psychometric test in question. Thus, further studies must then be made, not in order to better understand such a relationship but also to define the best points and cut for the test in question.