A Descriptive Study of First Presentation Psychosis in Old Age

Abstract

The descriptive findings in this study suggest that psychosocial factors require further investigation in patients presenting with late-onset psychosis. Comparison with younger first-onset psychotic subjects will be the subject of a later report.

Elderly patients with very late-onset schizophrenia-like psychosis and early-onset schizophrenia: Cross-sectional and retrospective clinical findings

“…However, in most studies, negative symptoms were absent in VLOSLP [14,20] while they were present in EOS and to a lesser extent in LOS [14]. Negative symptoms were not at all or barely mentioned in several studies on VLOSLP [18,21,24,26].…”

“…In terms of sociodemographics, there was generally a female preponderance in VLOSLP [1,14,18,20,22,[24][25][26]29]. Regarding education, in one instance patients with VLOSLP were described as being more educated than elderly EOS [26] but in another study they were reported to be less educated than LOS [25].…”

“…However, presence of formal thought disorders in VLOSLP generated contradictory results. Some authors reported formal thought disorders in 100% of French-speaking VLOSLP patients [25], while other authors working mostly on English-and Deutsch-speaking patients reported a low prevalence [18], and a lower risk of formal thought disorder in VLOSLP than in EOS patients [14]. Formal thought disorder was found to be absent in VLOSLP patients in the remaining studies [20,24].…”

“…Studies on VLOSLP alone [18][19][20][21][22][23], as well as studies comparing the profile of patients with VLOSLP with that of patients with LOS [14,24,25], elderly EOS [14,24,[26][27][28][29] and healthy controls [30,31] were also realized to better differentially characterize the demographics, clinical symptoms and evolution [14,20,29] of VLOSLP patients.…”

“…In terms of positive symptoms, mild paranoid delusions [14,26] mostly persecutory [18,20,21,24,25], auditory [18,21,25,26] and visual hallucinations [18,21,25], as well as all the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS) [32] behavioral disturbances except for psychomotor abnormalities [25] were described in VLOSLP. These symptoms were sometimes as common as in LOS [25].…”