| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立陽明大學 === 臨床護理研究所 === 107 === Background: Depression has become a common problem among elderly in long term care facilities, where elderly usually experience low mood and maladaptation due to their physical deterioration, environment changes, and low social engagement. Besides medicine therapy towards depression, multiple methods of alternative therapy were widely discussed in recent years, aroma-acupressure is one of the effective methods.
Design and Methods: This is an experimental study. Our subjects include sixty-two ≥ 65years old elderly in the long term care facility. All participants were randomized to experimental group and control group. The experimental group received lemon oil aroma-acupressure, on acupoint Hegu(LI 4), Shenmen(HT 7), Sanyinjiao (SP 6), Taixi (KI 3), whereas the control group received common massage. The study instruments are GDS-S, SPMSQ, ISE, and ADL. These instruments were all used in pre-test, middle-test, post-test, and post two-week test. We collected salivary cortisol samples at the pre-test and the post-test.
Results: The experimental groups’ GDS scores were significantly lower than the control group (P<0.001), and effectively maintained till the post two-week test. Comparing to the control group, the experimental groups’ SPMSQ scores were significantly changed (P≤0.05), but the effect did not maintain till the post two-week test. As for social engagement scores, there were no significant differences between the two groups, but both groups showed significant progress at both post-test and post two-week test (P≤0.05).
Conclusions: Our results suggested that aroma-acupressure was effective to improve depressed mood and cognitive function of dementia elderly. In addition, the intervention resulted in accumulated improvement of social engagement to our both sample group.
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