A scale evaluating the emotivity and well-being of elderly (Italian acronym: SVEBA): analysis of psychometric characteristics

The psychopathology in the aged is an increasing burden for the last decades of the life and a large source of expenditure. An early recognition and treatment could lead to reduce personal distress and improve prognosis. For the use in the General Pratictioner (GP) office and ward settings most of the short check-list, oriented to cover wider array of symptoms, has been designed for the Italian population in the '90 (called SVEBA abbreviated from its Italian name). This work intend to investigate the presence of symptomatological clusters in order to detect different profiles of symptoms in populations woth different comorbidities, in 214 home-dwelling elderly, with a mean age 80-2 years, referred to the geriatric memory clinic. We used the Keiser-Meyer-Olkin and Bartlett tests to check for applicability of factorial analysis, then a principal axis factoring extraction method was applied. The analysis identified the following factors: the first, collected items related to lack of motivation and initiative. The second is related to the perceived "locus of control". The third collected items related to sleep disturbance. The fourth included items related to somatic complaints and anxiety. In the structure of SVEBA index is possibile to identify three main symptom profiles related to motivation, anxiety and somatic symptoms and sleep disturbances.