A Group of Benign Chronic Psychoses: Prolonged Manic Excitements

Age, manic psychopathology and treatment response

“…The findings concerning drug treatment response in this sample are consistent with descriptions of prolonged time required to regain insight in elderly patients (Post, 1982). They also may reflect a change in the course of manic episodes in the elderly; increased episode duration and chronicity have been suggested by many investigators (MacDonald, 1918;Wertham, 1928;Rennie, 1942;Swift, 1907;Lundquist, 1945).…”

“…Studies in mixed-age patients have been fairly consistent in indicating a relationship between age and course of illness in bipolar disorder (Coryell and Winokur, 1982), however. Follow-up studies by MacDonald (1918), Wertham (1928), Rennie (1942), Swift (1907) and Lundquist (1945) found that duration or chronicity of manic episodes was increased with age; Angst et al (1973) did not.…”

Bipolar disorder in older adults: a critical review

“…We reviewed articles published across several decades, and their findings may reflect changes in length of stay and type of treatment settings, available medications, and differing non‐psychiatric treatments. For example, as pointed out by Dhingra & Rabins (40), comparison of more recent data with the studies of Roth (15) or Wertham (41) may be problematic due to the effect of the introduction of lithium. The number of studies reviewed that were published in the past 10 years accounted for about 30–50% of the entire set of studies reviewed (eight of 24 studies on prevalence, and 16 of 34 with descriptive information).…”

Bipolar Disorder in Late Life: A Review

“…In a 1955 study of 2000 first hospitalizations for mania, Wertham found infrequent cases beyond age 45. 16 Clayton reviewed three studies with a total of 399 mixed-age patients and found only six new cases (1.5%) with an age of onset of bipolar disorder over 60 ;17 however, these studies did not include patients with neurologic disease or report the total number of patients over age 60. 5,7,18 In contrast, two separate studies in Great Britain reported that the incidence of first admissions for mania within the general population increased with age.…”