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Objective: Death anxiety is abnormal or persistent fear of one's own death or the process of his/her dying. Age, gender, religiousity and physical/mental illnesses are the main predictors of death anxiety. However, previous research reported conşicting results both in clinical and non-clinical samples. Death anxiety in elderly group was higher than young adults in some studies (Galt 1998) while lower in others (Singh 2003). Death anxiety in mental illnesses was not very well studied either (Abdel-Khalek and Kuwait, 2005). The purpose of the present study was to compare death anxiety between young and elderly patients with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and to identify the correlates of death anxiety in these patients.
Method: The study sample consisted of 53 elderly (>=65 years old) and 99 younger patients (18-65 years old) who were admitted to the outpatient Psychiatry clinic of a university hospital and diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) according to the DSM-IV-TR criteria between September 2012- June 2013. A sociodemographic form, Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D), Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAM-A) and Templer Death Anxiety Scale (DAS) were applied to the participants. The DAS which was developed by Templer (1970) consists of 15 "yes or no" items and total scores range between 0 and 15. Higher scores represent increased severity of death anxiety. The reliability and validity of the Turkish form of the DAS was performed by Akca and Kose (2008). For statistical analysis, group comparisons were done by the independent samples t test and the ANOVA. Pearson correlation test was used for the analysis of correlations between the DAS scores and the other variables. All statistics were carried out by SPSS.
Results: Mean HAM-A scores and the education of the young patients were significantly higher than the elderly patients. The DAS scores were negatively correlated with education and positively correlated with the HAM-A and the HAM-D scores. When ANOVA was used, the DAS scores of elderly patients with GAD were found to be significantly higher than the young patients (F=7.15, p=0.008). That difference between two groups was associated with anxiety symptoms but not with sex, education or depressive symptoms.
Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the first study comparing the severity of death anxiety between young and elderly patients with GAD. The results of the present study revealed that most of the patients with GAD had high death anxiety and death anxiety seems to be associated with older age, lower education, higher anxiety and depression. Although anxiety scores of elderly patients were lower than the young patients, death anxiety was higher in the elderly group. Therefore, especially in elderly patients with GAD, death anxiety should be handled and further studies investigating the effects of therapeutic interventions targeting death anxiety in elderly patients are needed.