ArticleThe American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry2020
Depression Symptoms Declining Among Older Adults: Birth Cohort Analyses From the Rust Belt.
Article in The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trends in anxiety and depressive symptoms among adults in Norway based on eight population-based surveys from 1995 to 2024.Discover mental health · 2026Article
- Changes in the risk of depression in older adults in Poland from 2010 to 2019: results of two nationwide surveys.BMC geriatrics · 2025Article
- hERGAT: predicting hERG blockers using graph attention mechanism through atom- and molecule-level interaction analyses.Journal of cheminformatics · 2025Article
- Age, period, cohort effects in trends of depressive symptoms among middle-aged and older Chinese adults.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- The effect of community environment on the trajectory of depressive symptoms and cohort differences among middle-aged and older Chinese adults.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Age-period-cohort analysis of depression trends: are depressive symptoms increasing across generations in Germany?European journal of ageing · 2022Article
- Decline of depressive symptoms in Europe: differential trends across the lifespan.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2021Article
- The role of ageing in the wish to be dead: disentangling age, period and cohort effects in suicide ideation in European population.Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences · 2021Article
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6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesTo investigate potential birth cohort effects in depression symptoms in older adults.
designPopulation-based prospective cohort.
settingSmall-town communities in Pennsylvania.
participantsThree thousand two hundred and twenty seven older adults (average baseline age = 71.6) born between 1902 and 1941. MEASUREMENTS: Four decade-long birth cohorts were the primary predictors in this study: 1902-1911, 1912-1921, 1922-1931, and 1932-1941. The outcome was symptoms of depression assessed at baseline and follow-up study visits using a modified Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (mCES-D). The depression outcome was operationalized as: 1). A binary outcome of having greater than equal to 5 depression symptoms on the total mCES-D at any study visit, and 2). A continuous outcome of four factor-analyzed component scores of the mCES-D including depressed mood, anergia/hopelessness, withdrawal, and poor self-esteem. All analyses were jointly modeled with attrition and adjusted for age, sex, education, Mini Mental State Examination score, antidepressant medications, and total prescription medications.
resultsParticipants from more recently born cohorts were significantly less likely to have a study visit in which they reported greater than or equal to 5 depression symptoms, controlling for attrition. Specifically, in comparison to the 1902-1911 referent cohort, the 1912-1921 birth cohort was 43% less likely (odds ratio [OR] = 0.566, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.341-0.939), the 1922-1931 birth cohort was 63% less likely (OR = 0.0369, 95% CI: 0.215-0.632), and the 1932-1941 cohort was 79% less likely (OR = 0.205, 95% CI: 0.106-0.399). The cohort effect was most evident in the depressed mood and anergia/hopelessness symptom composites.
conclusionReduced rates of depression symptoms observed in successive birth cohorts of older adults may reflect compression of morbidity or other secular trends.
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