and Behavioral Sciences. MANIA IN THE ELDERLY

Forty-two patients 60 years old and older who fulfilled DSM-III criteria for mania were retro-spectively identified. Symptom profiles and treatment response were similar to those of younger patients. No evidence was obtained to support physical illness as a common precipitant of late-life mania. While depression in late life has received increasing attention in recent years, little has been written about mania in the elderly. The condition has been thought to be both rare and virulent. In Roth's (1955) study of mental disorders in old age, for example, almost half of the patients suffered an affective psychosis but only 0.6 % of the 464 cases examined suffered from mania. Roth noted that 'the fate of the manics deserves special attention since it was rather worse than that of the remainder of the affective group. Both at six months and two years after admission the majority of these patients are either in hospital or have died.' In a more recent study, Shulman & Post (1980) identified 67 cases of individuals 60 years of age and older who suffered from bipolar affective disorder. They noted that mania often began 'in late life and that there frequently was a long latency period be-tween the first episode of depression and the appearance of mania'. They studied indi-viduals who had mania at anytime in their lives, however, not individuals who neces-sarily had had a manic episode in late life. The present study examines a group of elderly individuals hospitalized for an episode of mania