Schizophrenia in the Elderly: Robustness of the Research Literature
The American psychiatric community has historically ignored the presence of schizophrenia in older adults, especially the elderly, because many researchers and clinicians had attributed the etiology of the disease to organic causes such as dementia (Howard, Rabins, Seeman, & Jeste, 2000). A substantial body of European studies, however, have revealed that a small percentage of schizophrenia patients experience their first symptoms of psychosis after the age of 60 independent of organic causes. The lack of progress in this area has been attributed to the nomenclature assigned to the different schizophrenia age groups, which remains confusing, with some research groups designating first diagnoses after the age of 40 as late-onset, while others set the age boundary at 55 or 60-years of age. The naming of the disease has also been confusing, with early researchers, such as Kraepelin in 1919, calling the condition paraphrenia to distinguish it from psychosis caused by dementia.
These problems continue to the plague the research literature, which tends to make it difficult to conduct systematic literature reviews on schizophrenia in the elderly. However, a search of Medline using the string "literature review AND late-onset schizophrenia" retrieved 62 citations. This essay will examine a few recent reviews as a way to evaluate the current state of research in this area.
Reviewing the Reviews
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