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Much More Common Than Previously Thought?

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2002;59:60-61.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

IN THE EIGHTH edition of his textbook, Kraepelin¹ first noted that patients with late-onset variants of dementia praecox had atypical features and lacked the deterioration of personality typical in younger patients. Bleuler² concluded that such late-onset cases of "schizophrenia" were rare, noting that only 15% of hospitalized patients had onset of symptoms after age 40 years, and a mere 5% after age 60 years. Assuming a lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia near 1%, the latter figure implies that the proportion of elderly people who will develop this condition is about 0.05%. Roth and Kay^3-4 applied the term "late paraphrenia" to these cases, and noted the lack of a family history of schizophrenia (compared with younger-onset cases) and a preponderance of women. In their classic textbook, Slater and Roth⁵(p580) asserted that such illness accounted "for some 89 percent of all first admissions (among women) over the age of 65." The relevant . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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