The Geriatric Anxiety Inventory (GAI) in both its full length (20 items) and shorter length (5 items) has been shown to be excellent in indicating clinically significant anxiety symptoms in older persons, in everything from clinical trials and intervention studies, to longitudinal population-based surveys. Now with the presence of COVID-19, an increasing amount of research is turning not only towards a vaccine, but also to demonstrating the emotional and social impacts of the virus, particularly on older persons.

Anxiety is often overlooked in research on older adults – the GAI can serve as a well-validated measure of self-report anxiety in COVID-19 research.

Anxiety COVID-19