Prevalence of Mental Health Morbidity and its Association with Physical Illness among Urban Elderly

Background: With massive urbanization and migration of young people abroad, coupled with waning of joint family, the number of elderly people living alone are increasing. As a result, the elderly may need to take care of their health themselves, and might be lonely or depressed, which leads to both psychological and physical health disturbances. Objectives: 1. To study the prevalence of mental health morbidities among the elderly of urban areas of Kamrup district. 2. To study theassociation of mental health morbidities with physical illness 3. To suggest recommendations on the basis of findings from the study. Methodology: A Community based cross-sectional study done over a period of 6 months in the urban areas of Kamrup district.Asample size of 300 was calculated. Results: The prevalence of mental morbidity in urban elderly was found to be 49.7% whereas the prevalence of physical morbidity was 78.3%. Depression was the most common mental morbidity followed by substance abuse, anxiety disorders and dementia affecting 27.6%, 24.3% , 21.6% and 7.6% of the respondents respectively. The most common physical morbidity was hypertension, affecting 54.33% of the respondents, followed by anaemia (34%) and musculoskeletal disorders(34%), diabetes (29 %).Significant association was found between hypertension and mental morbidities (p-value=0.269). Highly significant association was also found between vision problems and mental morbidities (p-valueless than0.0001). Analysis of data: Data collected was entered in Microsoft Office Excel and analyzed using SPSS 22. Criteria of significance used in the study was p less than 0.05. Proportions were calculated for different study variables . Odds ratio and confidence interval was calculated. Conclusion: The present community-based study reflects the extent and pattern of physical and mental health morbidities in an urban area. Hypertension,musculoskeletal diseases and vision problems were found to be associated with mental health morbidities like depression, anxiety and dementia.