Functional disability and neuroticism as predictors of late-life depression.

The authors investigated the association of premorbidly-assessed disability and neuroticism with the onset of late-life depression in 86 depressed and 72 randomly selected control persons, originating from a 1993 Dutch community study of elderly people. Compared with elderly people with average levels of disability and neuroticism, people with low levels were significantly less likely to develop a depressive disorder. High scorers, on the other hand, did not differ significantly from the average group. Furthermore, the data tend to suggest that the increased risk for depression associated with disability was larger for patients with higher levels of neuroticism.