Prevalence of depression among older adults living in care homes in China: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Section snippets
What is already known
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The pooled overall prevalence of depressive symptoms among China's older adults living in care homes ranged from 14.8% to 23.6%.
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Significant differences in prevalence emerged according to gender, age, and socioeconomic status.
What this paper adds
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The pooled overall prevalence of depressive symptoms among older adults in care homes in China was 36.8%.
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As China's government increasingly promoted the development of care homes, the prevalence still rose from 1991 to 2019.
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The review revealed significant differences in prevalence according to the type of care home, the individual's socioeconomic status, and the measurement instrument(s) used.
Method
Our review was conducted according to the guidelines of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA; Liberati et al., 2009) and the guidelines of the Meta-Analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (Stroup et al., 2000). It has also been registered at PROSPERO (Registration No. CRD42020190528).
Selection and characteristics of studies
Once duplicates were removed from the initial search results, 30,405 studies remained, and after their titles and/or abstracts were screened, the full texts of 109 studies were retrieved and assessed for eligibility. Of them, 40 studies were discarded according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. In particular, 27 were duplicates, eight did not report prevalence data or effect size, two studies did not measure depressive symptoms or depressive disorders, one study's sample did not include
Discussion
The pooled overall prevalence of depressive symptoms among older adults living in China's care homes reached 36.8% (95% CI, 32.7%–41.1%), which far exceeds rates reported in a recent systematic review and meta-analysis on the overall prevalence of depressive symptoms among community-dwelling older adults—that is, 20.0% (Tang et al., 2021). Those findings imply that older adults living in China's care homes are at a higher risk of depression than their community-dwelling counterparts, which
Conclusion
Having analyzed 67 studies addressing the prevalence of depressive symptoms among older adults in China's care homes, we identified three major trends. First, the pooled overall prevalence of depressive symptoms among such older adults was 36.8%, which far exceeds the prevalence of geriatric depression reported in previous systematic reviews addressing depressive symptoms among community-dwelling older adults in China. Second, from 1991 to 2019, the prevalence of late-life depression in China's
Declaration of Competing Interest
None.
Acknowledgments
None.
Funding
No external funding.
Data Availability Statement
The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article.
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