Objetive:

There is scarce evidence in Latin America that describes depression in the elderly population with fragility. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the relationship between depressive symptoms in elderly and the prevalence of frailty.

Material and methods:

We performed secondary analysis of the SABE Colombia 2015 survey. The Yesavage scale scores were used as an independent variable, the prevalence of frailty was estimated with the Fried fragility phenotype. We performed a descriptive and bivariate analysis of the sample, followed by a multivariate analysis adjusting for confounding variables.

Results:

We analyzed information from a total of 19,004 participants over 60 years of age, participants without cognitive impairment of the survey, who were administered the Yes-avage scale. The mean age was 69.25 years, 56 % of the participants were women, the prevalence of frailty was 12 % and depressive symptoms were found in 57.4 % of the sample. In the multivariate analysis we found statistically significant associations between frailty and the higher Yesavage scores (score 5-10) OR 1.20 (0.98-1.46) p valor 0.066 and (score> 10) 2.05 (1.46-2.89) <0.001 after adjusting for age, sex, comorbidities, functionality, schooling and marital status.

Conclusions:

Our study shows an independent relationship between depressive symptoms and frailty phenotype in the SABE Colombia 2015s survey There is lack of data and characterization of this population in Latin America regarding the relationship of these conditions, however our results are consistent with previous reports from this region.

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