Late-life schizophrenia: editor's introduction.

Until recently, most of the research on schizophrenia has focused on young adults. With increasing longevity, the number of older schizophrenia patients in the population is expected to grow. Late-life schizophrenia patients fall into two groups: those who developed schizophrenia for the first time in later adulthood (late-onset schizophrenia) and those who developed the illness earlier in life and are presently middle-aged or elderly. There is a scarcity of published studies on late-life schizophrenia. The available data tend to challenge the commonly held view of schizophrenia as a disorder with onset restricted to the first half of life and a progressively deteriorating course. Further work on this important but long-neglected patient population is urgently needed for clinical as well as research purposes.