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.

Author Biography

Dr. Okereke is a board-certified geriatric psychiatrist who is based at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH). A graduate of Harvard College and Yale University School of Medicine, she completed a general psychiatry residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/ McLean Hospital program and, later, a fellowship in geriatric psychiatry at McLean. In addition to her clinical training, Dr. Okereke completed a Master of Science in Epidemiology degree at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is currently an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Most of Dr. Okereke's time is devoted to an NIH-funded multi-year grant to evaluate the relationship between metabolic and lifestyle risk factors (such as diabetes, insulin levels, exercise and physical activity) and cognitive function in older participants of two major BWH/Harvard cohorts - the Nurses' Health Study I and the Physicians' Health Study II. Publications of this work have appeared in such journals as Archives of Internal Medicine, the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and Neurobiology of Aging. In addition, she maintains a clinical appointment as an affiliate staff psychiatrist at MGH in the Gerontology Research Unit and also sees patients in the neuropsychiatry clinical practice in the BWH Division of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, where her work is focused primarily on assessment and treatment of psychopathology in geriatric patients, particularly those with memory disorders.