It's not uncommon for the elderly to suffer from depression, especially when they're being treated for other illnesses. According to government stats, major depression affects between 1 and 5% of older adults in general, but that percentage spikes to 13.5% of those who need home healthcare and to 11.5% of elderly hospital patients.
If you know or suspect that one of your parents or another older relative is depressed, it's important to realize that depression isn't a normal part of aging. Although it's normal to feel sad over losses that often occur during the later years, lingering depression that interferes with an elderly person's ability to function requires treatment. Untreated depression can worsen other health conditions and, even more importantly I think, people deserve the chance to wring every ounce of joy out of life that they can, for as many years or days as they have left.
So it's clear that the elderly should be treated for depression, but what's less clear is which treatments are best. A new study finds that the SSRI drugs that are so popular these days (think Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa) might not be the best choices for the elderly, who seem to suffer more from these drugs' side effects. The study, published in the British Medical Journal, concludes that an older class of antidepressant drugs called tricyclics might be a better choice for seniors than SSRIs.
Researchers looked at data on more than 60,000 people aged 65 to 100 who were newly diagnosed with depression and found that over the course of a year 10.6% of patients taking an SSRI died vs. 8% of those taking tricyclics and 7% of those taking no antidepressants. The SSRIs known as Effexor, Remeron and Desyrel showed the highest risks, and in general the risks were highest in the month after starting an antidepressant and the month after discontinuing one.
One contributing factor may be that tricyclics are usually prescribed at lower doses than SSRIs, and this study certainly isn't an indictment of SSRIs for older people, as more research on the subject is still needed.
But this study is definitely something to consider if you're involved in the care of an older relative struggling with depression.