The late-onset psychoses. Possible risk factors

This article will discuss risk factors for two broad groups of illness. The first group includes schizophrenia and affective disorder, major psychiatric disorders in which hallucinations and delusions may occur and that may arise at any point during the life cycle. We argue for the continuity of late life-onset syndromes with their early life-onset counterparts. We will also discuss briefly a second group of syndromes in which psychiatric symptoms of a noncognitive nature arise during the course of pre-existing dementia syndromes characteristic of late life such as Alzheimer's disease and multi-infarct disease. Similar psychiatric syndromes appearing in other cerebral disorders of predominantly late-life onset, such as Parkinson's disease, will also be mentioned.