Quality of Life in the Face of Depression among Older People: A Cross-sectional Study in Brazil and Portugal

Objective: to analyze the association of depression levels with aspects of Quality of Life (QoL) in elderly users of Primary Health Care (PHC) in Brazil and Portugal. Methods: cross-sectional study, carried out with elderly people from PHC in Brazil and Portugal, between 2017 and 2018. We obtained a non-random sample of participants and selected for convenience. The Medical Outcomes Short-Form Health QoL (SF-36) instruments were used to measure QOL and the Beck Inventory to assess depression. We regrouped the variables of depression levels into “Absent/Mild” and “Moderate/Severe” and tested the crossing between them and the categorical variables of QOL “Better QoL” and “Worse QoL. Results: the total sample consisted of 150 participants (Brazil n= 100 and Portugal n= 50). In the association analysis between the variables of each group (Brazil and Portugal), we identified, in the Absent/Mild depression subcategory (n=129), the prediction for Better QoL in Portugal in the Functional Aspect domains (p-value =0.027/OR= 2.768), Physical Aspect (p-value