Background： To care the elderly today is to care ourselves tomorrow. Depression tendency in the elderly is an extremely important issue. Many factors have a great effect upon depression tendency. Leisure activities and clubs participation are both effective to reduce the risk of depression tendency, but we don’t know the co-effect of these on reduction of depression tendency. The purpose of this study is to discuss the co-effect of leisure activities and clubs participation on reduction of depression tendency in the elderly in Taiwan.
Objective: The object of this study was to explore the combinatorial effect of leisure activities and community involvement on depressive tendencies to elder people in Taiwan.
Method：This study adopted the database of the “Taiwan Longitudinal Study on Aging (TLSA) “ from Health Promotion Administration in 2007 . Our collection was all the cases in 2007 , excluding data incompleted, expired, cognitive impairment and cancer cases, 4161 objects were finally collected. By logistic regression, to fix demographics, socio-economic status, behaviors, diseases and other variables; and then to evaluate the influences and risks of depression tendency on leisure activities and clubs participation in the elderly after analysis .
Results：The elderly with neither leisure activities nor clubs participation are our control group, and there is a major reduction up to 75% in the risks of depression tendency in our experimental group who have higher frequency in activities participation (P =0.001). There is no significant finding in the elderly with higher participate frequency in only one part of the two variables.
Conclusion：Leisure activities and clubs participation can be significantly and negatively associated with depressive tendency. Higher participate frequency in both leisure activities and clubs participation can reduce the risk of depression tendency in the elderly in Taiwan, and therefore we should encourage our people to take part in recreational and organizational activities and association as often as possible, in order to reduce the risk of inclination to depression .
