DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-152234/v1
Background: The imbalance between urban and rural areas leads to heterogeneous loci of depression in urban and rural elderly and affects the depressive symptoms of elderly by changing the social environment. Depression amongst the elderly population is a worldwide public health problem, especially in China. Affected by the urban-rural dual structure, depressive symptoms of the elderly in urban and rural areas are different.
Methods: Based on the data of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2018y, 7690 elderly people aged ≥ 60 years were included in the final analysis. Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D-10) were used to measure the depressive symptoms, and the generalized linear model (GLM) and binary logistic regression were employed to assess the association between urban and rural source and depression.
Results: Depressive symptoms of the elderly in urban and rural areas were significantly different (P<0.001). GLM showed that the risk of depression in the rural elderly is 1.52 times (OR=1.52, 95% CI: 1.32 to 1.76) that of the urban elderly. The result of logistic regression showed that the influencing factors of depression in urban and rural areas were different. Gender, education level, life satisfaction, chronic disease and social activities were influencing factors of depression among the urban elderly. But for the rural elderly, influencing factors of depression were gender, education level, minorities, self-reported health status, life satisfaction, sleep duration (≤5h), chronic disease, social activities and income (except for pension).
Conclusions: The results of our study indicated that targeted and precise intervention strategies to prevent depression should be proposed for the urban and rural elderly respectively.