Prevention of Late-Life Depression: Current Clinical Challenges and Priorities

Olivia I. Okereke

Apr 2015 · Aging Medicine Book 9 · Humana Press

About this ebook

This book illustrates the imperative for late-life depression prevention, introducing a broad range of approaches to prevention and provides detailed examples of clinical applications of late-life depression prevention – all with consideration of medical and scientific, social, economic and global health perspectives. Clear guidelines are delineated for assessing, treating and preventing such conditions as depression and anxiety, dementia, psychosis and mania, sleep disturbances and personality disorders. Written by experts in the field, this text considers the complicating conditions that depression may incur higher costs and create during the course and treatment of comorbid major medical conditions that are also highly prevalent in older adults – including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

Prevention of Late-Life Depression: Current Clinical Challenges and Priorities is an important new volume that will be useful to all providers that are concerned with the mental health of our rapidly expanding aged population.

About the author

Dr. Okereke is an American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology-certified geriatric psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). She is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Assistant Professor in Epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale University School of Medicine, she completed a general psychiatry residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/ McLean program and a fellowship in geriatric psychiatry at McLean Hospital. She also completed a Master of Science in Epidemiology degree at Harvard Chan as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Kirschstein-National Research Service Award recipient. At BWH, she holds appointments as an Associate Psychiatrist in the Department of Psychiatry, where she provides continuity outpatient care in geriatric psychiatry, and also as an Associate Epidemiologist in the Department of Medicine. Additionally, she is a clinical affiliate psychiatrist in the MGH Gerontology Research Unit and Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Her programmatic goals are: (1) to employ epidemiologic research methods to identify modifiable risk factors involved in healthy mental aging and (2) to translate and apply knowledge gained into effective strategies for large-scale prevention of major adverse mental aging outcomes, such as late-life depression and cognitive decline. As a Principal Investigator, Dr. Okereke has obtained numerous independent research grants from the National Institutes of Health and private/non-profit foundations. Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, Annals of Neurology, JAMA Neurology, American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and other scientific journals.