Confiabilidade e validade da escala de depress？o geriátrica em idosos com doen？a arterial coronariana

background: the prevalence of depression in individuals with coronary artery disease (cad) is high. the geriatric depression scale (gds) is a broadly used tool to screen for depression in elderly individuals. in brazil, the psychometric properties of the short version have not been adequately assessed. objective: to evaluate the psychometric properties of the short version of the gds in patients with cad treated at a cardiology outpatient clinic. methods: the present is a cross-sectional study that assessed 209 elderly individuals (≥ 65 years) with cad using the gds-15, the cumulative illness rating scale for geriatrics (cirs-g), the brazilian oars multidimensional function assessment questionnaire (bomfaq) and the cambridge examination for mental disorders of the elderly (camdex). the internal consistency of the gds-15 was calculated through the kr-20. a factorial analysis of this scale was carried out. the gds-15 scores were compared with the diagnoses of depression (dsm-iv) for the validity of criteria. at the analysis of concurrent validity, the same scores were correlated with those of the camdex, mini-mental state examination (mmse), cambridge cognitive examination (camcog) and bomfaq depression scales. results: clinical depression was diagnosed in 35.71% of the sample assessed according to the dsm-iv. for the diagnosis of major depression or dystimia, the cutoff 5/6 presented moderate accuracy (auroc = 0.84), sensitivity of 79.92% and specificity of 78.29%. the internal consistency was 0.80. at the factorial analysis, three obtained factors explained 52.72% of the total variance that was observed. the gds-15 scores correlated with those of the camdex depression scale. conclusion: in general, the gds-15 presented good reliability and validity (concurrent and of criterion). in cardiologic settings, its use, which is simple and fast, can be utilized in the screening for depression.