Anxiety, depression and their association with functional dependence in fragile elderly adults

Objective: To determine the association between anxiety, depression, and functional dependency in frail older adults from the Geriatrics Department of the Centro Médico Naval. Methodology: Secondary observational study including data from 522 patients. Selected patients met frailty or pre-frailty criteria using the Fried phenotype. Variables included Anxiety (Hamilton scale), Depression (Yesavage scale), and functional dependency (Lawton index), along with their association with other demographic variables. Results: Out of 522 older adults, the majority were over 80 years old (46.96%). Additionally, anxiety frequency was found to be 68.97%, depression 43.10%, and functional dependency 55.75%. Participants with more than 2 comorbidities had an 88.52% higher frequency of functional dependency (p ≤ 0.001). A higher proportion of functional dependency was observed in frail patients, 51.20% (p ≤ 0.001). Furthermore, factors associated with functional dependency were anxiety (85.22%; p ≤ 0.001) and depression (69.06%; p ≤ 0.001). Additionally, in the Poisson regression analysis, patients with anxiety showed an association with functional dependency 2.60 times greater (95%CI: 1.99-3.39). Lastly, patients with depression had a prevalence of 2.95 times more functional dependency (95%CI: 2.47-3.52). Conclusions: This study reveals that functional dependency in older adults is significantly linked to anxiety and depression, with the latter being of greater relevance.