Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-5r2nc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-12T10:32:50.804Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Clinical Heterogeneity in Senile Dementia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Carrick McDonald
Carrick McDonald*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Melbourne University, and Kew Mental Hospital, Victoria. Maudsley Hospital, Denmark Hill, London, S.E.5
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Roth and Morrisey (1952), in isolating senile dementia (senile psychosis) as a distinct nosological entity, used as their definition “an illness of insidious onset pursuing a uniformly progressive course with steadily augmenting mental decay”. In 1955 Roth defined senile psychosis as “a condition with a history of gradual and continuously progressive failure in the common activities of everyday life and a clinical picture dominated by failure of memory and intellect and disorganization of a personality, where these were not attributable to specific causes such as infection, neoplasm, chronic intoxication or cerebral vascular disease known to have produced cerebral infarction”. Kay (1962) defines dementia as a “gross deterioration of intellectual capacity and of memory, together with severe and persistent disorientation for time and place”. He diagnosed senile dementia “when there was no evidence of focal brain disease”. Roth et al. (1966) describe senile dementia as “the extreme form of intellectual decay of old age”.

Type
Organic Psychoses
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 115 , Issue 520 , March 1969 , pp. 267 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1969 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Brain, Lord (1965). Speech Disorders. Second edition. London: Butterworths.Google Scholar
Corsellis, J. A. N. (1962). Mental Illness and the Ageing Brain. Maudsley Monograph No. 9. O.U.P. Google Scholar
Goldstein, K., and Scheerer, M. (1941). “Abstract and concrete behaviour: an experimental study with special tests.” Psychol. Monogr., 53, No. 2, 151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kay, D. W. K. (1962). “Outcome and cause of death in mental disorders of old age: a long term follow-up of functional and organic psychoses.” Acta psychiat. Scand., 38, 249–276.Google Scholar
Kral, V. A. (1962). “Senescent forgetfulness: benign and malignant.” J. de l'Ass. méd. Canadienne, 86, 257–260.Google Scholar
Roth, M. (1955). “The natural history of mental disorder in old age.” J. ment. Sci., 101, 281–301.Google Scholar
Roth, M. and Morrisey, J. D. (1952). “Problems in the diagnosis and classification of mental disorder in old age.” J. ment. Sci., 98, 66–80.Google Scholar
Roth, M., Tomlinson, B. E., and Blessed, G. (1966). “Correlation between scores for dementia and counts of ‘senile plaques’ in cerebral grey matter of elderly subjects.” Nature, 209, 109–110.Google Scholar
Siegel, S. (1956). Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioural Sciences. New York and Maidenhead, Berks.: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.