Transcript

Hello.  My name is Dr. Kurt Klauburg.  I’m a geriatric psychiatrist with Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital and here today to talk with you about geriatric psychiatry.  Geriatric psychiatry is a specialty of medicine much like cardiology and obstetrics is.  As a geriatric psychiatrist I have extra training and experience in the treatment of mental illness in older people, geriatric psychiatry being the study and treatment of mental illness in later life.  As a geriatric psychiatrist I see folks who suffer with mental illness that they acquired in younger years and carried with them into their older years.  

Also, I see folks who have developed mental illness that is uniquely special to older age much like dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease is.  Everybody’s heard of Alzheimer’s Disease; fewer of dementia and fewer of the other kinds of dementias that people are afflicted with, Alzheimer’s Disease being the most common problem, most common form of dementia.  Secondly, vascular or what used to be called hardening of the arteries, we refer to as vascular dementia.  Dementia almost exclusively is a disease of older people.  I say almost exclusively because we know that some younger people can develop dementia; and in the case of Alzheimer’s Disease even as young as mid to late 30s.

For the most part dementia is a disease of old age.  The older a person is the more likely they are to develop dementia.  In recent years, the last ten years in particular, we’ve seen an exponential growth in the research and treatment options of dementia and mental illness as a result of the dementia.  We’ve now seen medications and treatments that can slow the progression of the disease, and most importantly, medications that can control the more difficult behavior complications that come about with dementia.  And that’s the area that I specialize in, dealing with behavior complications of dementia.

We have many different treatment options available, in particular with medications.  We see almost on a monthly basis that there are new medications coming out that we’re using to treat dementia and the behavior problems associated with it.  And we are now having better luck at keeping people with dementia out of the nursing home, out of facilities, and able to be cared for at home for longer periods of time.  For more information, people can look under the website at phoebeputney.com and click under Behavioral Health.