Gender differences in depression: symptom patterns, risk factors, and etiology E-Book

Michael Unrath

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Medicine - Pathology, grade: 1,3, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Institut für Medizinische Biometrie, Epidemiologie und Informatik), course: Epidemiology of chronic diseases, language: English, abstract: Marked gender differences with respect to the prevalence and symptoms of depression have been observed for years. The aim of this selective review is to give a rather broad and comprehensive overview of the topic by looking at gender differences in depression from various angles, including symptom patterns and measurement, risk factors, course of disease, and etiology in both children and adults. Important findings of the last two years are described and discussed, including recommendations for further research and health care practice.

Leseprobe

Table of Content

Methods p

Symptom patterns and measurement: children and adolescents p

Symptom patterns and measurement: adults p

Risk factors and course of disease: children and adolescents p

Risk factors and course of disease: adults p

Discussion and conclusions p

Literature p

Page 2

differences in basic socio-demographic variables explain the gender differences in depression? Another possible explanation consists in the use of generally gender-biased diagnostic instruments. The aim of this paper is to describe the current state of knowledge about gender differences in depression by giving a selective overview of relevant international literature of the last 2 years.

Methods

A literature research was carried out in February 2009 by entering the search terms “gender differences” AND “depression”, “male depression”, or “female depression” separately into the Pubmed search engine. The search was restricted to current literature from the years 2007-2009 in either English, German or Spanish language. The named search terms had to appear either in the title or the abstract of the article. Articles dealing with very specific subgroups like female prisoners or subgroups suffering from specific comorbid psychic or somatic disorders were excluded from the search. Only articles that were available right away via the institutional access of Mainz University were considered for the review. In the end, 28 relevant articles were collected. Table 1 gives a short overview of key features of these articles. First author, publication year, study design, study sample, instrument(s) used for the measurement of depression, main topic, and country in which the study was carried out, are displayed. The two articles by Möller Leimkühler, Heller and Paulus (2007) refer to the same study and report the same results. All the other articles refer to different studies or study samples.