Why is late-life depression harder to treat?
Toronto Scientists have found an important clue in the quest to understand why people who suffer from depression in later life are harder to treat and keep well in the long term. A study led by Toronto’s Baycrest has found that older adults with depression don’t respond normally to emotional stimuli, such as when they see happy, sad or neutral faces. The study appears online this week in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and is likely the first published data to focus specifically on emotional processing in un-medicated older adults with late-life depression. “In our study we found significant differences between older depressed subjects and older healthy subjects in how they emotionally respond to and perceive facial expressions,” said principal investigator Dr. Linda Mah, a clinician-scientist in the Mood Clinic at Baycrest. Emotion dysregulation is already well established in mid-life depression and some studies have shown it to be predictive of a relapse of mood symptoms
