Our aims were to explore prevalence of anxiety among patients admitted to departments of geriatric psychiatry for treatment of various diagnoses and to examine how often anxiety was registered as a previous or ongoing diagnosis.
In all, 473 patients admitted to one of five departments of geriatric psychiatry were included in a quality register and examined according to a standardized protocol. The Geriatric Anxiety Inventory (GAI) was used to measure anxiety during the first week after admission. Diagnoses were made at discharge.
Using a cutoff on the GAI of 8/9, the prevalence of anxiety for the following diagnostic groups was depression 65.3%, psychosis 28%, dementia 38.8% and mania 33.3%. Of 24 patients with a primary diagnosis of anxiety, 66.7% scored above 8 on the GAI. Of 236 patients with a GAI score above 8, only 22 (9.3%) were reported to have a comorbid anxiety disorder by the treating psychiatrist. In a multiple regression analysis, we found that the severity of depression (beta 0.585, p