Cognitive Disorders

Although high blood pressure may put patients at risk for dementia, a class of antihypertensives appears to have a preventive effect.

Helping patients who have significant medical illness as well as mental illness is a challenge, especially when the diagnosis is unclear. Hospital psychiatrists play a critical role in the management of these behaviorally compromised patients.

The latest news in geriatric psychiatry covers olfactory deficits in cognitively impaired patients, a smartphone app for older adults with serious mental illness, and adjunctive ketamine for late-life depression.

The genetics of dementia, dyslipidemia, and diabetes may hold the key to preventive therapy.

Three recent studies on dementia show antioxidants lack preventive effects, autoimmune disease hospitalization is a risk factor, and cognitive stimulation has modest benefits.

Functional remediation therapy addresses the cognitive problems of the nearly 50% of patients who remain impaired even when euthymic.

The caffeine in your morning cup of java could pack a neuroprotective punch.

Insights from 3 recent studies on the benefits of mental stimulation for mild cognitive impairment, effect of brain stimulation on memory, and risk of dementia in men with sleep apnea.

Can cardiovascular fitness help older adults ward off dementia?

What effects do illness and treatment have on cognition? Here's a deep dive.

Personal enhancements (eg, cosmetic surgery) have gained societal acceptance, but cognitive enhancement poses significant ethical, philosophical, and sociopolitical issues.

The co-occurrence of depression and cognitive impairment doubles every 5 years after the age of 70. Here we present a list of elements in a comprehensive and extended evaluation of depression in the elderly.

Older adults seem willing to take a hypothetical predictive test-and plan accordingly.

Three new studies offer insights into psychiatric disorders in the elderly.

What should you tell your patients with schizophrenia about exercise?

Here: a look at several natural products used to improve cognitive impairment or cognitive symptoms of dementia.

Does this patient have decision making capacity to refuse a blood transfusion that will likely save his life? You are the ethics consultant, and the decision is yours.

Details of a randomized trial of an alpha-7 nicotinic receptor agonist in schizophrenia.

Depression can be accompanied by cognitive symptoms, but the nature of the relationship between these symptom categories is multifaceted.

Ethics case quiz: A patient's inconsistent decisions regarding treatment are cause for concern. What to do?

How radically do we want to alter the physician’s traditional ethical obligations to the most vulnerable of patients?

While most clinicians know about Huntington disease, they may not be aware of its devastating effect in cognition and behavior during onset in childhood and adolescence.

The latest research on the global risk of Alzheimer disease and other dementias.

A quick guide to common neurodevelopmental conditions and their associated late-life neuropsychiatric manifestations.

This article reviews a wide array of medicolegal, risk management, regulatory, and forensic mental health issues in the older population, which is growing at an accelerated rate.

Although delusional jealousy was described as an initial symptom in Alois Alzheimer’s first case report, little is known about its clinical features and prognosis in dementia.

Although a number of observational studies point to an association between conventional antipsychotic agents and increased risk in older patients, new research suggests such findings may have been flawed.

Therapeutic lying, a concept that is currently seeping into the medical literature, is the practice of deliberately deceiving patients for reasons considered in their best interest.

What do physicians intend by the term “disease”? The recent IOM report on “systemic exertion intolerance disease” (formerly known as chronic fatigue syndrome) casts this question in a new light and has many practical implications for patients, physicians, and third-party payers.

An in-depth look into the behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia.