Older adults face numerous health and social challenges while aging. Limited mobility, neglect, disrespect of society, and economic difficulties make elderly citizens highly prone to stress and vulnerable in their everyday life. All unfavorable conditions disrupt physical and mental health making older adults permanently ill. This evidence becomes even fiercer as the number of aged population is likely to double in the first half of the twenty-first century.
Physical and mental health is so integral that the dysfunction on the one side is likely to drag illnesses on the other. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, dementia, Parkinson’s disease and many other conditions usually make older adults terminally ill. In addition, the elderly often start to suffer from depression as soon as they are diagnosed with any disease. The problem is that they oversee issues on their mental health suspecting that things usually come this way with people of their age. Which is worse, doctors sometimes ignore the symptoms of depression in elderly patients due to neglect or underestimation of the disease. Nevertheless, providing a good treatment for depression at the early stages, doctors make sure that patients recover from physical conditions as well.
Neither depression nor dementia is the normal part of aging. Deterioration in memory and thinking strongly disrupts the life of the elderly as it is a kind of mental disability. Elderly people with depression take huge risks to develop chronic conditions even if they are visibly able to take are of themselves. To start a timely and effective treatment, people have to pay more attention to their aging parents. There must be someone to insist on paying a visit to geriatrician if the elderly show any signs of depression.