Assessment of Anxiety in Older Adults

This chapter reviews the current state of knowledge regarding anxiety disorders assessment in older adults. Anxiety disorders, whether in older or younger adults, remain the most frequently occurring diagnoses across all age groups including those aged 60 and above. Despite the prevalence of these disorders, they remain largely understudied in this older cohort. The assessment of anxiety in older persons has likewise not been a focus of attention in the literature. Anxiety assessment in geriatric samples may pose issues not found when evaluating younger individuals, such as how social, developmental, and medical contexts influence the extent to which specific symptoms or behaviors represent pathology and the influence of significant, but subsyndromal anxiety. The situation is further complicated given the dearth of normative data regarding anxiety assessment in older adults, as well as by the fact that the majority of psychometric instruments used to study anxiety have been developed for use with younger populations and the psychometric properties of these instruments have remained largely uninvestigated with regard to geriatric samples.