During the first three months after someone suffers from a stroke, the risk of depression is much higher. A large population survey found that more than one quarter (25.4 percent) of individuals that suffered a stroke were diagnosed with depression within two years. More than half of these cases occurred within the first three months of the stroke itself. What’s even more disturbing than this statistic is the fact that it is almost impossible to tell how many undiagnosed individuals also suffer from depression. This is especially a problem within the senior community as there is a large number of seniors that suffer from depression that never are diagnosed or treated for the illness. It has a huge impact on their quality of life and can hurt them in many other areas of their life.
In the elderly, the risk of depression is already a little bit higher. For those that need senior care, there is even more potential for mental illness. Having a significant change in your lifestyle is never easy, especially if there is now a greater dependence upon other people. It doesn’t matter if your family member is in need of professional care at a nursing home, or if a family caregiver or an in-home caregiver can more than cover all of their needs. This is a big change in their life, and it can have a mental toll. Depression or anxiety can be common responses to this.
The point is that no matter where depression comes from , or what its direct cause might be, having safeguards built into your elderly loved one’s care to help fight it is the best way to make sure that it doesn’t deteriorate any further. Poor mental health can lead to poor physical health, and it can even increase the risk of early mortality. Helping your loved one to combat this will help them in many ways. Besides keeping them healthier in a physical sense, it keeps them happier and enjoying their life to a greater degree despite whatever difficulties they might be facing as their lives change.
In this particular study, over 135,000 individuals that had experienced a stroke were observed. Researchers also looked at 145,000 healthy individuals within the same age range to get a feel for how many non-stroke sufferers experienced depression. This control group found that only 7.8 percent of this group suffered a diagnosis of depression during the two year timeframe, and in the first three months of the study, less than 2.5 percent suffered depression. Obviously there is a lot of opportunity for this study to have flawed data, but with all of the research already out there connecting strokes with depression, the results are very distressing. It just goes to show that one of the several things that you need to be aware of when helping care for an older family member is that their mental health is just as important as their physical health. Keep this in mind when you are looking for senior care.
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