Older adult outpatients with major depression (« = 25) and healthy control subjects (n = 25) were compared using the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Both measures were sensitive in detecting clinical depression. Subjects were, however, more likely to endorse multiple responses on BDI items, suggesting that the GDS is simpler for older adults to complete. Viewed within the context of previous relevant research that used these instruments to compare older adults, our results yield additional evidence of cross-study consistency in the functional efficiency of both measures.Two of the most popular self-report measures of depression currently used are the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS; Yesavage et al., 1983) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979). Yet, in the elderly, their relative efficiencies as screening instruments for major depression have been assessed solely in Veterans Administration (VA) samples of male psychiatric inpatients (Hyer & Blount, 1984), medical inpatients (Morris, Gallagher, Wilson, & Winograd, 1987), and medical outpatients (Rapp, Parisi, Walsh, & Wallace, 1988), but not in psychiatric outpatients.Functional efficiency, the accuracy with which a screening instrument can distinguish one group of subjects (e.g., depressed elderly) from another, was estimated for the GDS and BDI by comparing healthy, older-adult male and female outpatients with major depression to age-and gender-matched control subjects. In addition, because the Somatic subscale on the BDI might increase the likelihood of false-positive diagnoses in older adults (Hyer & Blount, 1984), and because the true-false format of the GDS might be simpler for older adults to complete than the multiple-choice format of the BDI (Norris et al, 1987), item-response properties, the style in which individual items are completed, were examined. Method SubjectsSubjects (N = 50) were community-dwelling male and female older adults (mean age = 64.2, SD -5.36, range = 56-77 years), recruited

Peptide T was not significantly different from placebo on the study primary end points. However, additional analyses indicated that peptide T may be associated with improved performance in the subgroup of patients with more evident cognitive impairment (ie, NP global deficit score > or = 0.5) or with relatively preserved immunological status (ie, CD4+ cell count > 0.200 x 10(9)/L).

Cognitive performance was assessed in older (60-75 years) and middle-aged (40-59 years) unmedicated outpatients with major depression and in healthy controls to examine potential interactive effects of age and depression. Cognitive performance was assessed from three categories of tasks: verbal, visual-spatial, and visuo-motor scanning tasks. Depressed subjects did not perform as well as controls on visuo-motor scanning tasks that included the Trail Making Tests A and B, and the Symbol Digit Modalities Test. Likewise, the older compared to the middle-aged group was slower on the visuo-motor scanning tasks. In addition, the older group showed poorer performance on visual-spatial tasks. Neither depression nor age group effects were observed for the primarily verbal tasks. Age and depression combined in an additive (noninteractive) fashion such that the older depressed subjects performed worse than the middle-aged depressed subjects, and older and middle-aged controls, on visuo-motor scanning tasks.

Presents a brief review of personality theories and psychotherapeutic activities to point out how such theories and practices have contributed to the myth of the inferiority of women. Traditional therapy is portrayed as having served to bring woman to accept her oppressed condition rather than encouraging active striving toward self-satisfying goals. Recommendations include training to increase the awareness of sources of oppression in therapists, the education of more female therapists, and such things as assertion training for women and consciousness-raising groups.

The University of Southern California Repeatable Episodic Memory Test (USC-REMT) was developed to provide a brief assay of memory in clinical drug trials where the same subject is tested multiple times over days or weeks. Therefore, it had to be minimally affected by repeated testing. The test also provides a measure of subjective organization, a cognitive strategy that might be sensitive to frontal lobe dysfunction and HIV-related memory deficits. The USC-REMT has seven different lists, each composed of 15 semantically unrelated, high-frequency nouns. The words are presented in a different order on three study-test trials. After each study trial the subject recalls the words in any order. The test takes about 10 min to administer and score. The recall protocol can be scored for (a) global mnemonic efficiency, (b) primary and secondary memory, (c) subjective organization, (d) recall consistency and (e) recall as a function of serial position. We report initial data showing that the test is sensitive to memory decrements. Thirty-six HIV-1 seropositive men, at various stages of illness, recalled significantly fewer words and exhibited less subjective organization than 14 matched controls. The test had no significant practice effects over the first three administrations when separated by several days. The seven alternate lists are essentially equivalent. The USC-REMT appears to complement currently published verbal memory tasks.