Clinically relevant depressive symptoms were diagnosed by face-to-face interviews, using the short-form of a validated Chinese version of the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) longitudinally (Lai et al., 2005; Lee et al., 1994). It was translated and adapted to better fit the cultural context of the Chinese elderly.The short form was used to measure and act as a screening tool for geriatric depression since the elderly tended to be fatigued with long questionnaire. The participants were asked about 15 depressive symptoms that they might have experienced in the week preceding the interview. The 15 items were rated on a dichotomous scale from 0 to 1 (0=no, 1=yes) and these items were recorded so that 1 referred to the presence of a depressive symptom and 0 referred to the absence of a depressive symptom in each item. The scores of the whole scale were the unweighted sum of the 15 component items, with a potential range of 0 to 15, with higher scores indicating more depressive symptomatology. A cutoff score of 8 or higher indicated clinically relevant depressive symptoms. The GDS short form was found to be a highly reliable (reliability coefficient of 0.90), and the 8-symptom cutoff point yielded 96.3% sensitivity and 87.5% specificity for assessing geriatric depression in Hong Kong (Lee et al., 1994). For easy understanding, we referred to the presence of depressive symptoms as“depression” although we knew that the term was not synonymous with clinical depression.