摘要："Background: Elderly people suffer from communicable and non-communicable diseases. This is compounded by impairment of sen-sory functions like vision, hearing, and stability management leading to cognitive impairment. Elder mis-treatment, financial exploitation, psychological abuse and abandon-ment may have serious medical and social consequences like depression Objective: The study was conduct-ed to assess the burden of depres-sion and cognitive impairment among the elderly persons in a rural and urban field practice areas of Shimoga Institute of Medical sci-ences, Shimoga. Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted among elderly in rural and urban field practice areas of Shimoga Institute of Medical Sci-ences, Shivamogga. Data was col-lected by doing house-to-house vis-its after informed consent with semi-structured, pre-designed and pre-tested questionnaire. Analysis was done by using SPSS version 21 software. Proportions and frequen-cies were calculated, the Chi Square statistical test was used to analyze the association between variables. Conclusion: The study concluded that the prevalence of depression in rural elderly was established to be 60/210(28.6%) while in urban elder-ly it was 85/210(40.5%). Based on MMSE for assessing cognitive im-pairment showed 20% (42), 2.9% (6) had mild and moderate impairment respectively in rural areas where as in urban 38.1%(80), 14.3%(30) had mild and moderate impairment re-spectively. ".
