INTRODUCTION: We did not find studies evaluating diagnosis and prevalence of depression in patients with hematological diseases in Brazil. OBJECTIVE: To verify the prevalence of depressive symptoms and to identify which of them better help discriminate hematological inpatients who are depressed. METHODS: A transversal study was conducted with 104 inpatients consecutively admitted to the hematology ward of Hospital Universitário of Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Data on sociodemographic variables and history of psychiatric disorders were collected. The Charlson Comorbidity Index (CI) was used to measure medical comorbidity. Depressive symptoms were assessed using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Those who scored above 9 in the sum of the first 13 items (BDI-13) were considered depressed. We also evaluated prevalence using all the 21 items (BDI-21), by means of a cut-off score of 16/17. RESULTS: Prevalences were: BDI-13 = 25% and BDI-21 = 32.7%. After control for confounders, the symptoms that remained in the logistic regression model, indicating their ability to detect depressed patients, were sense of failure, anhedonia, guilt and fatigue. CONCLUSIONS: Around a quarter to a third of hematological inpatients had significant depressive symptoms and the ones that better discriminated depressed patients were sense of failure, anhedonia, guilt and fatigue.
depressive symptoms; hematology; medical inpatients; psychiatric comorbidity; prevalence
