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Age as a Moderating Effect for Anxiety, Depression in Cancer Survivors
Age as a Moderating Effect for Anxiety, Depression in Cancer Survivors
First published in Psychiatry Weekly, Volume 9, Issue 12; December 15, 2014
In cancer survivors, what effect might age have on 1-year history of anxiety and depression? Researchers exploring this question used data from a large epidemiological survey in which 702 out of 16,423 adult participants reported cancer history. In this study, published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, younger cancer survivors were more likely than age-matched peers to have a 1-year history of depression (16.0% versus 9.5%) and anxiety (23.8% versus 13.9%). Older cancer survivors, however, had lower rates—both overall and in comparison with peers—of depression (1.9% versus 3.9%) and anxiety (3.7% versus 6.3%). The strength of age as a moderating variable was also borne out by multivariable modeling, in which the younger group had significantly greater odds of depression and anxiety (OR: 6.13 and 5.84, respectively) than the older group (OR: 0.45 and 0.55, respectively). www.ajgponline.org/article/S1064-7481(13)00321-7/abstract
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