Anxiety and depression before and after the menopause

Abstract 

Objective: Our purpose was to investigate the anxiety and depression at postmenopausal women. Methods: We studied 32 postmenopausal and 32 premenopausal patients aged between 40—55 years in Kırıkkale University Medical Faculty Obstetric and Gynecology Department. We performed Beck depression scale and State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) I and II on those patients. Blood samples were taken from each patient. We used student’s t test, pearson correlation analysis. Results: Beck depression test results were 21.3 ± 6.7 and 15.1 ± 5.6 in postmenopausal and premenopausal women respectively (p < 0.001). STAI-I were 50.4 ± 9.1 and 47.5 ± 8.5 in this 2 groups (p = 0.19) and STAI-II values were 47.5 ± 9.1 and 45.4 ± 7.5 (p = 0.33). We could not find a correlation between anxiety-depression and blood FSH, LH and E₂ levels. We found a correlation between parity and depression (r = 0.423 p = 0.01). There were positive correlations between anxiety and depression tests (r = 0.489 p = 0.01 for STAI-I and r = 0.398 p = 0.01 for STAI-II). Conclusion: Depression rate is significantly higher in menopausal women.