engleski

Comorbidity among depressive and nondepressive patients in family medicine practice

Depressive disorder, one of five most frequent disorders in family medicine practice, remains unrecognized from the family medicine doctor in the great number of cases. One of the reasons of not recognising depressive disorder could be comorbidity of different chronic diseases and depression especially at elder patients. Co-morbid depression can contribute to the worsening of physical illnesses and physical illnes can increase depression.500 adult patients, randomly sampled, in the order of their arrival into the family doctor clinic in Rijeka, Croatia, were tested with the following guestionnares: Beck's depression inventory, General questionnaire created for the purpose of this research and existing medical records. Using the results of BDI out of total number of patients we could form two groups. One group included subjects with low or normal level of depression and the other group was consisted of subjects with incresed level of depression: mild, moderate or sever depression. Analysing the results of general questionnaire and medical records, we found several differences in morbidity between groups of depressive and non-depressive subjects. Depressive patients in comparation with non depressive, suffer more often from heart, mental, kidney and osteomuskular diseases Depressive subjects in comparation with non depressive use significantly higher amount of medicines. Antirheumatics, sedatives, antiallergics and diuretics are medicines more often used by depressive patients. It is neccesary to make more effort in detecting symptoms of depression in patients with chronic diseases especially in heart, kidney, osteomuscular and mental diseases.

comorbidity; depressive and non depressive patients; family physician

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