Screening and Quantification of Depression in Mild-to-Moderate Dementia Through the GDS Short Forms

Abstract

We evaluated the validity of the 1-, 4- and 15-item versions of the GDS in 51 patients affected by mild to moderate dementia, using the long form as standard. The following sensitivity and specificity values were obtained: 66% and 91% for GDS-1, 93% and 87% for GDS-4, 79% and 100% for GDS-15. GDS-15 also showed good agreement with GDS-30 in defining the severity of depression. These findings support the use of GDS-4 for the screening of depression and of GDS-15 for its severity assessment.