MILD DEPRESSION LEVELS ALTER SELF-PERCEPTIONS OF FUTURE BUT NOT THE RECALL OF VERBAL INFORMATION IN ELDERLY INPATIENTS

In order to determine the correlation of levels of symptoms of depress ion and rate of forgetting and perception of the future, a total of 68 elderly inpatients without Major Depression admitted to a general hos pital were evaluated by: 1) the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Sc ale (MADRS), 2) the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), 3) a questio nnaire on future self-perceptions (FSPQ), and 4) a test on the recall of verbal information to estimate the rate of forgetting. They were gr ouped according to the clinical prognosis of their disease (good, N = 48, 25 women, 23 men, age mean +/- SD, 68 +/- 6.64; poor, N = 20, 10 w omen, 10 men, age mean +/- SD, 69 +/- 6.68) which correlates with morb idity-mortality rates (low/high). There was no relationship between mi ld levels of signs and symptoms of depression and increased forgetting . However, levels of depression were negatively correlated to the scor e of future perceptions (B = -0.18, beta = -0.29, P = 0.032). Patients with diseases with good prognosis did not present different levels of depression, rates of forgetting or future expectations from those of patients with poor prognosis (high mortality rates). However, individu als with negative FSPQ scores showed significantly higher MADRS scores , independent of the type of disease. These data suggest that the modi fications in the processing of information related to the future are p resent in clinical patients without Major Depression but they occur wi thin a small range of very mild signs and symptoms of depression.