Video call and depression among older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan: The JAGES one-year longitudinal study

Evidence of video call on preventing late-life depression during the COVID-19 pandemic is limited. We examined the associations of social contact (in-person, voice call, and video call) with incidence of depressive symptoms and evaluated whether specific factors (particularly, age and change in the frequency of in-person contact) affect these associations. We used longitudinal data from the 2019 and 2020 waves of the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study, including 10,523 participants aged ≥65 years in 10 municipalities. Depressive symptoms were measured by the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15) score ≥5 in main analysis, and GDS-15 score ≥4, 10, or continuous variable in sensitivity analyses. Social contact represented frequency changes before and during the pandemic: non-contact (reference), decreased-contact, maintained-contact, and increased-contact. We employed modified Poisson regression analysis. Compared to non-contact of video call, the association of increased-contact of video call with depressive symptoms was insignificant in main analysis (GDS-15 ≥ 5: risk ratio (RR) = 0.89, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.79–1.01), whereas significant in sensitivity analyses (GDS-15 ≥ 4: RR = 0.89, 95% CI: 0.82–0.98; GDS-15 ≥ 10: RR = 0.71, 95% CI: 0.53–0.97; GDS-15 = continuous variable: Β = −0.17, 95% CI: −0.33 to −0.002). In-person contact was significantly associated with lower incidence of depressive symptoms (non-contact: reference; maintained-contact: RR = 0.92, 95% CI: 0.85–0.99; increased-contact: RR = 0.84, 95% CI: 0.77–0.91), whereas voice call was not. Age and change in the frequency of in-person contact did not show significant effect modifications on the associations of video call with incidence of depressive symptoms after Bonferroni correction for multiple testing. In conclusion, this study suggests that the evidence supporting video call as a way to protect against depressive symptoms among older adults during the pandemic appears weak compared to the evidence for in-person contact.