Assessing depression in a geriatric cancer population

Abstract

Although these measures produced good internal consistency and were better than chance at predicting depression in a geriatric cancer sample, the published cutoff scores for these measures did not perform well in predicting MDD nor minor depression. Of the three measures, the CES-D appeared to have the most utility. This data suggests that these popular screening measures may be inadequate for reliably identifying depression in a geriatric cancer population. Researchers and clinicians, therefore, should use caution when selecting depression measures for geriatric cancer patients and consider using the lower cut-off scores presented here.