Late-life psychosis: An overview

Abstract

There could be multiple causes for late-life psychosis, such as chronic conditions, like early-onset schizophrenia, late-onset schizophrenia, delusional disorder, psychosis associated with various dementias, various neuropsychiatric disorders, delirium, and secondary to organic causes. This article will provide an overview of late-life psychosis by elaborating different types of psychotic disorders usually seen in the elderly population. Psychosis associated with dementia and delirium is usually accompanied by cognitive symptoms. Organic Psychosis is usually characterized by higher prevalence of visual hallucination. There are few well-designed randomized controlled evaluating the efficacy of atypical antipsychotics for management of various forms of psychosis in elderly and there is a black box warning for using atypical antipsychotics in elderly patients with dementia.

Keywords

• Late life psychosis
• late-onset schizophrenia
• paraphrenia
• psychosis with dementia