Age- and Gender-Specific Considerations in Depression

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The rate of depression and anxiety is a woman is higher than it is for the men. This is why while treating the anxiety and depressions; it is important to make the age and gender disorders because a lot of the factors that cause the conditions might be varying between the different sexes and genders hence varying ways of approaching the problem. For instance, women have underlying factors that make them more vulnerable to being depressed or having anxious disorders such as the reproductive-associated mood disturbances which include premenstrual dysphonic disorder, postpartum depression and premenopausal mood disturbances. Doctors are still analyzing data that is being collected to understand the response of medication for depression and anxiety disorders. Women may experience depression more than partly because of the shifting reproductive hormonal environment that they go through every month during their pre-menopause years. Women who suffer from other disorders such as dysphonic disorders have their symptoms change during their menstrual cycle. This is not the case for those not in their menstrual cycle. Understanding this can greatly help with how to administer and treat the depression and anxiety disorders.

The age factor comes in due to the fact that when women reach their menopause years, they no longer have menstrual periods which mean that their symptoms are not altered due to the periods. The way the treatment will be administered to a young woman and an elderly one might differ because they have different symptoms and effects to the medication. The gender factor is important in the sense that the reasons men suffer from depression or anxiety disorders are different from the women’s. The response to the antidepressant treatment is also different. Treatment with imipramine which is a tricyclic antidepressant (TCA) revealed that there was a greater response in men than in women. The same results also revealed that older women and men generally had a better response to the TCA treatment than younger women had. These young women responded better to monoamine oxidase inhibitors or otherwise referred to as (MAOIs). Another drug sertraline was received with greater response by men than women too.

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