The purpose of this study was to investigate the current status of sleep quality and depression tendency on the elderly in the communities, and further more to explore the effects and relationships among different background variables, including demographic variables, disease history, lifestyle, depression tendency, and sleep quality.
Methods:
This was a Cross-Sectional Survey, proposed sampling. All the participants were came from four communities, in Wufeng District of Taichung City, who were invited to complete a questionnaire when they visit the community care center for sports. The included criteria were: (1) Over 65 years old; (2) Conscious clear can understand verbal meaning. The excluded criteria were:(1) who was diagnosis as dementia; (2) Mental disorder. Participants was invited to complete questionnaire, after they signed the consent. The questionnaire included three parts, the demographic items, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index ( PSQI) and Geriatric Depression Scale-Short Form 15 (GDS-SF15).
Results:
There were 65 participants completed the questionnaire, but 3 of them were excluded because of incomplete data. The participants were 38 females and 24 males, age from 65-90, 85.5% has chronic disease, such as hypertension, heart disease. The mean score of PSQI was 5.19±3.66, from 0 to 17, and the mean of GDS-SF15 was 2.4, from 0 to 14. Gender had significant differences in sleep quality (p=0.002), and t value was -3.426, it showed that the sleep quality in females were worse than males. The SF-GDS score was significantly associated with "Sleep disturbance at night"(p=0.030), "daytime dysfunction" (p=0.006), "self-awareness of stress"(p=0.000), and "smoking habits"(p=0.038).
Conclusion:
The results could provide medical and community health team as the basis for caring the elderly, design strategies to relieve the discomfort of the elderly, reduce depression, ease the quality of sleep, by promote living habits, increase sport exercise, and then improve the sleep quality, thus reduce the use of drugs such as hypnotic agent, promote the health of elderly, prevent depression.Determining the causality of the sleep disturbance could help to treat insomnia in the elderly and improve overall their health