A scale evaluating the emotivity and well-being of elderly (Italian acronym: SVEBA): analysis of psychometric characteristics.

The psychopathology in the aged is an increasing burden for the last decades of the life and a large source of expenditure. An early recognition and treatment could lead to reduce personal distress and improve prognosis. For the use in the general practitioner (GP) office and ward settings most of the short check-lists available are focused on depression symptoms. For this reason a 15 items check-list, oriented to cover a wider array of symptoms, has been designed for the Italian population in the '90 (called SVEBA abbreviated from its Italian name). This work intended to investigate the presence of symptomatological clusters in order to detect different profiles of symptoms in populations with different comorbidities, in 214 home-dwelling elderly, with a mean age 80.2 years, referred to the geriatric memory clinic. We used the Keiser-Meyer-Olkin and Bartlett tests to check for applicability of factorial analysis, then a principal axis factoring extraction method was applied. The analysis identified the following factors: the first, collected items related to lack of motivation and initiative The second is related to the perceived "locus of control". The third, collected items related to sleep disturbance. The fourth, included items related to somatic complaints and anxiety. In the structure of SVEBA index is possible to identify three main symptom profiles related to motivation, anxiety and somatic symptoms and sleep disturbances.

Relations between a novel, reliable, and rapid index of arterial compliance (PP-HDI) and well-established inidices of arterial blood pressure (ABP) in a sample of hypertensive elderly subjects.

Hypertension is a risk factor for a long-lasting arterial wall-remodelling leading to stiffness. The rapid method measuring the pulse pressure (PP) by means of the tool of Hypertension Diagnostic Instruments (HDI) called PP-HDI, overcomes some of the problems arising with more-time consuming methods, like ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM), and give information about the elasticity of the arterial walls. We studied the relationship between the PP-HDI, the large artery compliance (LA-C) and small artery compliance (SA-C) and few well-established indices of arterial blood pressure (ABP) in a sample of 75 hypertensive subjects, aged 65 years and over. Significant correlations between LA-C and heart rate (HR), PP-ABPM and PP-HDI were found. SA-C relates with HR and systolic blood pressure (SBP) measured in lying and standing positions. Applying a stepwise regression analysis, we found that LA-C variance stems from PP-HDI and HR, while SA-C variance stems from SBP in lying position. Receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves for thresholds of PP showed that PP-HDI reached levels of sensitivity/specificity similar to PP-ABPM. In conclusion, surveillance of ABP through hemo-dynamic indices, in particular of SBP, is essential, nevertheless the advantage of this control is not known in an elderly population where the organ damage is already evident. PP needs necessarily an instrumental measurement. The PP-HDI result is similar in reliability with respect to PPABPM, but is more rapid and well applicable in an elderly population.