This study analyses the potential years of depressive symptom-free life expectancy in later life, including long-term conditions, from territorial and gender perspectives.

The authors found that older women expected to live twice as many years with depressive symptoms as their male counterparts across all regions of the country. Furthermore, older men living in the southern and northern macro-zones have more free years of depressive symptoms than those in the metropolitan region.

At the national level, the presence of multi morbidity in Chilean older adults was found to reduce the number of free years of depressive symptoms by an average of 4.3 years in men and 5.7 years in women indicating that multimorbidity has a differential effect on the development of depression, being more detrimental in certain macro-regions of the country and reducing the number of years of life free of depressive symptoms.

Regional and gender disparities in depression and late life expectancy in Chile