The cluster analysis of depression symptoms in elderly patients

The vast number of clinical and psychopathological studies of depression in elderly patients is based on the simple description of symptoms. In the present paper, authors studied clinical and psychopathological symptoms of depression in elderly people using statistical cluster analysis. Four main clusters of psychopathological symptoms were singled out. The further cluster analysis revealed significant between-group differences in clinical and anamnesis information that were not included in the analysis. Based on this finding, we proposed that each cluster reflected a specific clinical type of depression in the old age. The atypical combination within each type did not allow to identify definitely the nosological attribution of depression according to current classifications. In conclusion, the study of the psychopathology of depression in elderly people using methods of multivariate statistics makes it possible to find new clinical variants of these disorders that may improve diagnosis and allow for differentiation of treatment.