Depression and Sleep Quality of the Elderly in a Taiwanese Fishing Village

[[abstract]]The objective of this study was to probe into the relationship between senior citizen depressions and sleep quality of the elderly residing in fishing villages. We chose the old folks over 65 years of age living in a certain fishing village located in Yilan County as our study subjects, and did a survey through a structural type questionnaire. Altogether we interviewed 142 such elderly people in this study.The tools and approaches of our study included five items, i.e.demographic characteristics evaluation, health status, life-event scale,geriatric depression scale-short form (GDS-SF), and Pittsburgh sleepquality index (PSQI), and we eventually came up with the followingresults: 1. Such individual old fishing villagers received an average depression score of 3.58?2.28, and the percentage of them showing depressed conditions turned out to be 38.7%. 2. Their individual average score of sleep quality was 5.65?3.27, and 40.8% of them were found suffering from poor sleep quality. 3. It appeared the older the age, without work, and no exercise habit would have resulted in suffering from greater number of chronic ailments, and those who believed themselves being in poor health status would likely be in more serious depressed situation. 4. It also seemed that to be a female without exercise habit would entail the individual to suffer from more chronic diseases, and those who felt having poor health would often have inferior sleep quality. 5. Depression, disease counts, and gender combined could explain 48.5% of the total variations in sleep quality. Among them the predictive power of ?depression? is the strongest, which could be accounted for 34.8% of the total variations by it alone. 6. For those who suffered greater numbers of chronic diseases the odds for their sleep quality deteriorating were 1.72 folds than those with fewer chronic ailments. Comparatively, the odds for those elderly folks with depressed situations to have poorer sleep quality was 2.18 folds that for those without