The increased aging population who have aging-related diseases poses a serious challenge to health services, including mental health services. Due to the changes of body, brain, living environment, and lifestyle, the elderly will have different psychological changes from other age stages, some of which would develop into mental disorders, and affect the cognition of the elderly in turn. This elderly mental health condition has drawn wide attention from scientists. This chapter introduces the two most common emotional and affective disorders, late-life depression and anxiety, and focuses on their epidemiology and impact on the elderly. Furthermore, this chapter also reviews the effects of these two disorders on cognitive function and cognitive impairment in the elderly, and tries to explain the underlying mechanism of this effect from the perspective of related disease, cerebral circuit, and molecular biology.
Keywords: Anxiety; Cognition; Late-life depression; Underlying mechanism.
© 2023. Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.