ABSTRACT
An acute state of confusion should always be referred to a doctor. This is especially so if periods of confusion alternate with lucid intervals, because the condition is potentially curable. Such confusion frequently has a physical cause – for example, anaemia, pneumonia, bruising, a broken bone, heart trouble, kidney disease, taking too little fluid, infection, or the side-effects of drugs. Depression is the most common mental disorder affecting people between sixty-five and seventy-five. What it is important to stress, however, is that depressive illness in old age is just as amenable to treatment as when it occurs in young people. But all too often depression in the elderly is overlooked. It may be regarded as just merely a normal condition of old age. Dementia of either variety affects more than one person in five of those aged over eighty. A gradual deterioration in performance, however, is likely to have begun from the sixties. This is due to ageing or 'senescence'.
