The effect of depressive symptoms on falls of middle-aged and elderly people based on the PSM method

Abstract

Depressive symptoms and falls are both health risk factors in middle-aged and older adults, with potentially fatal injuries. In order to analyze whether the middle-aged or elderly who has depressive symptoms excluding the influence of endogenous problems and obtain higher robustness, the propensity score matching (PSM) method is adopted using the data from 2015 Charls. The analysis is done to observe the performance difference between the treated group (with depressive symptoms) and the untreated group (without depressive symptoms). Control variables are gender, age, location, education level, children’s company, spouses’ company, number of chronic diseases, sleep duration at night, self-report health level, life satisfaction, and whether disabled. The results show that both the Kernel matching method and the Radius matching method have passed the balance test, with the respective ATT values of 2.30 and 2.36. It indicates that the group of middle-aged and elderly with depression symptoms tend to fall, compared to the group without depression symptoms. This way, special attention should be paid to the walking safety of middle-aged and elderly people with depressive symptoms, intending to avoid more serious injuries caused by falls that occur to depressive middle-aged and elderly people.