بررسی شیوع سوء‌رفتار با سالمندان شهرستان‌های گرگان و آق‌قلا در سال 1392

Objectives: Aging and its subsequent issues must be considered as the main challenges of the future.&nbsp;Studies on abuse of the elderly are very limited. This study which was conducted in 2013 and aimed to&nbsp;determine the prevalence and types of domestic abuse in the elderly referred to health care centers in&nbsp;Gorgan and Aq-Qala cities, Gorgan Province, Iran. Methods & Materials: In this cross-sectional analytical study, through a random sampling, 465 elders aged&nbsp;65 or older (125 men and 254 women), residing in the health care centers in Gorgan and Aq-Qala, were&nbsp;enrolled. A face-to-face interview was carried out with all participants at the health care centers. First,&nbsp;their cognitive states were evaluated using the Iranian version of abbreviated mental test score and if&nbsp;they obtained the score of 6 or higher they would be entered in the study, after taking their informed&nbsp;consents. Then, the domestic elder abuse questionnaire for elderly people and a questionnaire designed&nbsp;by the authors for collecting demographic and personal data was administered. Descriptive (percentage,&nbsp;frequency, mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (The Chi-square, t-test) were performed&nbsp;using SPSS (version 16). Results: The total frequency of elder abuse was 63.3%. The highest frequencies were related to care neglect&nbsp;(59.8%) and psychological abuse (53.3%) and the lowest ones belonged to physical abuse (8%) and&nbsp;abandonment (8.2%). Some factors, including sex (P<0.034), ethnicity (P<0.0001), location (P<0.0001),&nbsp;and age (P<0.035) were significantly different between the 2 groups of abused and non-abused. Conclusion: Because of the high level of elder abuse by family, providing awareness programs for seniors,&nbsp;caregivers and health care providers seems to be essential to prevent and reduce the neglect and abuse&nbsp;of older people.