Abstract
We investigated the prevalence of “high” levels of depressive symptomatology and 13 health-related medical conditions in elderly Mexican American (MA) and non-Hispanic white (NHW) residents of El Paso County, Texas. We analyzed the extent to which depressive symptoms in this population are associated with these conditions. Elderly MA residents possessed a higher prevalence of current depression, a relatively unique health-related condition profile, and were more likely to experience a set of conditions that impede participation in daily life—conditions that we found to be strongly associated with high depressive symptomatology in the elderly. After adjusting for educational attainment, using multiple regression analyses, depression was not associated with ethnicity and only six of the health related conditions showed significant differences between MA and NHW subjects. We believe these results provide an important insight into the mechanism of health-related conditions and depressive symptomatology in a large sample of elderly MAs; and how conditions typically attributed to MA ethnicity may in actuality be an artifact of socioeconomic status variables such as educational-attainment.
Highlights
A number of authors feel that assessment of depression and comorbid diseases among elderly minority populations has been relatively neglected in the geriatric psychiatry literature [3, 10, 17, 23] and that this state of affairs applies to Mexican American (MA) elderly populations, where depressive symptomatology and diseases such as diabetes are relatively common [24]
Studies that focus exclusively on MA populations typically draw ethnicity-based conclusions either by looking at various degrees of within-group acculturation or by comparing their research findings with those collected from non-Hispanic white (NHW) samples living elsewhere in the United States
The current study found that 13.3% of the elderly MA sample endorsed high levels of depressive symptoms (CES-D rating of 16 or higher), which is lower than the 25.6% of elderly Hispanics who reported high rates of depressive symptoms in the 5-state H-EPESE sample [17]
Summary
Over the past 15 years or so a number of studies have investigated the prevalence of depression in Hispanic populations [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22], along with comorbidity between depression and various types of health-related conditions [10, 17]. In actuality a fair number of such studies have been conducted, and we feel that attention should be focused on precisely what factors are associated with these differential ethnic findings. A salient issue for us involves the extent to which these previous findings may reflect life conditions associated with socioeconomic status (SES) per se rather than some yet to be determined ethnic or cultural trait. Comorbidity between depressive symptomatology and various types of health-related conditions does represent a crucial research problem because negative health outcomes, including untimely death, tend to be associated with depression [25,26,27,28]. Since ethnic groups as a whole may exhibit disparities at the level of income and education, important determinants of ethnic differences in rates of depressive symptomatology may Depression Research and Treatment be linked to relatively independent factors associated with SES
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call