LATE-LIFE PARANOIA - POSSIBLE ASSOCIATION WITH EARLY TRAUMA AND INFERTILITY

We have collected data on 39 persons with late-life onset of paranoid symptoms, all but two of whom are women. We identified a subset of nine patients that met the criteria for delusional disorder. This group differed significantly from both demented and long-term schizophrenic patients on a number of variables. There was only one live birth among these nine women; more than half were refugees or holocaust survivors; there was an absence of a predicted sensory loss; and the manifestation of the paranoia was qualitatively different. Several issues are discussed: there is a late-life delusional state that is neither schizophrenia nor dementia; the paranoia in these delusionally disordered patients cannot be accounted for exclusively by the social isolation hypothesis; there is an interaction among early trauma, the absence of children, and the appearance of paranoid ideation late in life.