[Personality disorders in late life: an overview].

As efforts on refining the concept of personality disorder (PD) have increasingly advanced, the diagnosis and treatment of elderly patients with PD have emerged as a new clinical issue. Personality traits of the elderly are a result of accumulated influences of a large variety of factors: original character traits, physiological changes caused by aging, major life events and experiences, etc. Accordingly, the assessment of PD in elderly patients needs information of the respective vast areas. To distinguish PD from enduring personality changes caused by various physical and psychiatric conditions is also an important and difficult task. In clinical settings, various means such as family intervention and social work other than psychogeriatric treatment in a strict sense are taken to resolve manifested personality pathology.