Resilience and physical health are associated with stress and depressive symptoms in older adults

What is it about?

Aging involves progressive decline of physical, cognitive, and psychosocial functioning. Several chronic diseases become more prevalent with aging (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, arthrosis etc.), so that aging poses several challenges and may have important impacts on the mental health of the elderly. In this scenario, it is relevant to understand the factors associated with better mental health, including physical health (chronic diseases) and individuals’ psychological factors, such as perceived-stress and resilience – the capacity of coping with and recovering from stressful situations. Here, we investigated this issue in a sample of 458 community-dwelling older adults. Our results revealed associations between high number of diseases with high levels of perceived-stress and depressive symptoms. Importantly, high resilience level was associated with lower number of diseases and lower levels of perceived-stress and depressive symptoms, suggesting that resilience may be considered a protective factor of psychological suffering (stress and depression) in the older population.

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Photo by leah hetteberg on Unsplash

Photo by leah hetteberg on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study is unique in presenting how several chronic diseases highly prevalent during aging were associated with psychological factors, namely, perceived stress, depressive symptoms, and resilience. Twelve diseases were associated to stress, with anemia, tumors, osteoporosis, low vision, circulatory problems, and respiratory diseases having the largest impacts. Nine diseases were associated to depressive symptoms, with heart diseases and anemia having the largest effects. Eleven diseases were associated to resilience, with hypertension, anemia, and osteoporosis having the largest effects. These results were detailed analyzed and compared to other studies.