Study On The Short-term Memory Characteristics Of The Elderly Patients With Depression And Their Self-rating Of Short-term Memory

This study investigated the aspects of short-term memory, self-rating of short-term memory and the relationship between the objective memory and subjective memory of elderly patients with depression and those of controls. To find out the reason why the patients with depression complained their poor memory so frequently, The Clinic Memory Tests and another recognition questionaries with self-rating required before recognizing were employed. 22 elderly patients with depression responding to F32.0 and F32.1 in CCMD-3 criteria for research were compared the scores of the Clinic Memory Tests with 42 healthy controls. And 22 patients were compared the scores of recognition and self-rating of memory with 42 healthy controls. Results: 1. The scoring of the elderly patients with depression was significantly lower than that of the healthy controls in the tests of point-to memory, associative learning, free image recall and portrait-associated memory (P<0.01). there was no difference in the recognition of meaningless images between the two groups (P<0.05). 2. Patients with depression rated themselves lower recognition than the controls. The self-ratings of the patients were not significantly correlated to their scores in objective recognition memory tests, while that of the healthy controls were. Conclusions: 1. Elderly patients with depression recall fewer words and pictures than the healthy controls do, while they recognize the same number of words as the healthy controls. 2. The healthy controls could predict weather they can recognize the words correctly or not, while the patients with depression could not. The patients would like to say that they could not recognize the word which they should remember. The controls are likely to say that they could. The complaint of poor memory may be contributed to their incorrect self-ratings of memory.