[Structure of mental diseases of the 2d half of life according to the results of an epidemiologic study].

An investigation of all patients (with the exception of alcoholics) residing in a city district and registered at a psychoneurological dispensary revealed that after 40 years the disease began in almost one-fourth of the cases (24.7%). In the majority of cases (56%) these were diseases characteristic of the second half of life: vascular pathology (45.3%), involutional psychoses (6.6%), presenile dementia (2.2%) and senile dementia (1.9%). Other findings included schizophrenia in 24.3%, manic-depressive psychoses in 2.7%, psychogenias in 7.6%, consequences of head trauma in 2.2% and other exogenias in 3.7%. The clinical and social parameters of the prognosis in mental diseases first expressed after 40 years of age were on the whole lower but they reflected the modern tendency to attenuation of pathological manifestations: by the time of examination the status of 48% of patients was characterized by intermission or syndromes of a nonpsychotic level.