Handbook of Geropsychiatry for the Advanced Practice Nurse: Mental Health Care for the Older Adult: Anxiety disorders

Later life anxiety is often found in conjunction with major depressive disorders, and can have foundations in dietary issues as well as drug associations. There has been a correlation between long-term presence of anxiety in older adults associated with female gender, lower level of educational achievement, being unmarried as well as having three or more co-morbid chronic conditions. The most common diagnosed anxiety disorder in the geriatric population is generalized anxiety disorder. Other anxiety disorders frequently encountered in practice include social phobia, agoraphobia, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This chapter briefly outlines and discusses each disorder. It helps the practitioners to: define anxiety; distinguish between anxiety disorders; discuss example tools that can be used to establish an anxiety disorder diagnosis; assess a geriatric patient for post-traumatic stress disorder using an appropriate clinical rating scale; and recommend general pharmacological (class) and non-pharmacological treatment options for anxiety disorders.