CHICAGO (Reuters) - Depression among the elderly is a common and often chronic condition because it usually goes untreated, Dutch researchers said Sunday.

The six-year study involving interviews with 277 elderly people previously diagnosed with mild to deep depression found roughly two-thirds had recurrent bouts of the disease.

Only 14% of the participants, who were aged 55 to 85 at the start of the study, had short-lived symptoms and 23% reported remissions in their depression.

"In later life, depression is a common disorder, with well-documented consequences for well-being, daily functioning (and) mortality," psychiatrist Aarjan Beekman of Vrije University in Amsterdam wrote.

"Although depression is generally regarded to be highly treatable throughout the life cycle, most elderly persons with depression remain untreated," he added.

Fewer than one quarter of study participants had been prescribed antidepressants, he wrote in the Archives of General Psychiatry, a journal published by the American Medical Association.

"The implications of the study are that the burden of depression for elderly persons in the community is even more severe than previously thought," Beekman wrote.

"The data clearly demonstrate the need for interventions that are helpful, acceptable, and economically feasible to be performed on a larger scale. Especially in the area of (more easily treated) non-major depression, designing and testing such interventions should have a high priority," he added.

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