Validação do Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) para a população idosa brasileira

Abstract

The older population has been growing in Brazil. Hence, the elderly needs become important in a populational context. In the health field, mental disorders are important because of their high prevalence. Dementia and depression are the main disorders among senior citizens. Therefore, to diagnose mental disorders in the elderly is extremely important. One of the ways of accomplishing this is using questionnaires and scales that provide diagnoses according to international criteria, such as CID-10 and DSM-IV. This study aims at examining the validity of one of these questionnaires, the "Patient Health Questionnaire-9" (PHQ-9), in a population of older adults, allowing its use for the screening of major depression. The gold-standard reference will be the "Revised Clinical Interview Schedule" (CIS-R). In a previous study, both scales were applied to subjects with sixty years or older, who lived in the cities of São Paulo and Manaus. 1377 individuals were evaluated with PHQ-9 and CIS-R, and sociodemografical information was also collected. This sample and its database will be used for the statistical analysis of the current study. The goal of the statistical analysis is to examine the validity of PHQ-9 for the elderly Brazilian population and to determine the cut-off point to discriminate between "cases" and "non cases".