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One of the important public health issues worldwide is the rise of higher proportion of older aged with advancement of medicine, prolonged life expectancy and for improved health care facilities. Demographic projections suggest that mental illness along with heart diseases, AIDS and cancer will account for the top four illnesses around the globe very soon. It ranks up at the top along with heart disease, cancer, obesity, AIDS and injuries as leading causes of suffering. Increased longevity of elderly led to higher prevalence of age related neurological disorder like depression, anxiety and so on.In view of this, main objective of the paper is to evaluate the level of depression and anxiety among the rural and urban Indian elderly aged 65 years to 79 years and their possible socio-demographic correlates. Severity in depression and anxiety level is found to be significantly higher among rural males and females in comparison to their urban counterparts. The result of logistic regression analysis indicates that several socio-demographic covariates are the significant predictor of depression and anxiety occurrence. It can be inferred from the present study that rural population is in more vulnerable condition than urban elderly in depression and anxiety prevalence.

A substantial proportion of the world's elderly population resides in the developing countries. It is noted that there has been an increase in longevity for these elderly and as a consequence their health profiles have changed. For example, it has been observed that increased longevity led to higher prevalence of age related neurological disorder like dementia. In India, community based studies on cognitive impairment and associated lifestyle factors are very few and such studies in the eastern part of the country is virtually lacking.In view of the above, a comparative profile of cognitive function between rural and urban elderly of West Bengal, India, has been reported in the present study. The study has also been purported to identify the role of socio-demographic factors on cognitive function.A structured demographic questionnaire was used for collection of socio-demographic data and MMSE [1] was canvassed for collection of data on cognitive function from a sample of urban and a rural elderly population. The study sample includes 381 elderly of both sexes, taken from both urban (176) and rural (205) settings in the Indian State of West Bengal with an age range of 65 to 79 years (mean age 70.6 years). Results of the study indicate that the cognitive impairment is significantly higher among the rural elderly than their urban counterparts, irrespective of sex. The results also demonstrate that more adversities in cognitive function occur in female gender, irrespective of area of residence. Multinomial logistic regression model reveal that age, sex, marital status, self earning, family earning, family size and number of living children are the important predictors of cognitive impairment in the study population.

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