Gary Small, M.D., UCLA Center on Aging
Question: Do people with Alzheimer's disease or other dementias tend to become depressed?
Answer: Alzheimer's disease is a devastating illness for patients and their family members. And we see a high rate of depression in patients who have the disease. Fortunately we can treat that depression with anti-depressants to some extent.
But some of those depressions may reflect an underlying brain degeneration, and is not just a reaction psychologically to losing mental faculties. So we see the problem, we're trying to understand it better, and we'd like to have better treatments.
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