P02-20 - Comparing the Incidence of Anxiety and Depression Between Two Wards of Internal Medicine and A&E (2005 –2006)

Abstract

Introduction

Negative emotions such as anxiety and depression have been related to increased mortality in both healthy individuals and medical patients The method of treatment would be changed when the patients have psychological problem. In internal ward researcher observed many patients that them shown psychiatric disorder such as depression and anxiety. Therefore, this study has been done for evaluation of prevalence of anxiety and depression and comparison with a control group.

Materials & methods

In this cross-sectional study, we checked 150 patients of internal medicine department and 150 patients, who have admitted to the A&E department as a control group. They have chosen by a Purposive accessible sampling method. A questionnaire form, namely “SCL-R-90” was filled by a group of nursing student. This is known as a standardized questionnaire in Iran. Data have been computed and analyzed by SPSS V.13 and we used t-student, Mann-Whitney tests and logistic regression methods. The results have been considered significant when the two tailed p-value was less than 0.05.

Results

In internal ward 69.3% and A&E department 42% of patient have had depression (OR=3.5, 95%CI=1.9—6.5). Anxiety were observed in 50.7%of internal medicine patients and 12% of A&E's patients (OR=1.94, 95%CI=5.1 —23.7).

Conclusion

Prevalence of the depression and anxiety in internal ward patients was significantly higher in compare to A&E's patients. Therefore, it's necessary to consider these patients in order to diagnosing for the early treatment. Recommendation are made to further investigate by greater sample size and different setting in this field is warranted.