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This study aims to characterize people with dementia who were charged with criminal offences between 1995 and 2020 and describe their offending. Court cases were derived from Australian legal databases and descriptive data were manually extracted from case reports. Of 62 people variously charged with homicide, assault, child sexual assault, breach of conditions, property and larceny offences, driving offences, perverting the course of justice and arson, 46 were identified as having executive dysfunction, either as stated by medical expert witnesses or implicitly, due to conditions like Huntington’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. Offending history was found to differ depending on offence type and dementia type. Executive dysfunction appears to underly offending in the sample; furthermore, some disease factors may combine to ‘inhibit’ or ‘permit’ offending. Permitting factors include executive dysfunction and younger age at time of offending; inhibitory factors include dementia-related impacts on mobility, memory and reaction speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We sought to determine whether or not there were differences in medical, criminological and legal factors between older and younger offenders with diagnoses of delusional jealousy by undertaking a retrospective case-file search of Australian legal databases. Our results demonstrate that older offenders were more likely to have comorbid dementia whereas younger offenders were more likely to have comorbid substance use and chronic psychotic conditions. A history of domestic violence frequently predated the index offence but we were unable to determine if this was due to psychosis or a pre-existing tendency for violence. Despite a common diagnosis, the older offenders were more likely to be made forensic patients rather than sentenced prisoners when compared with the younger offenders. Consequently, different factors might mediate the pathway to violence in older and younger people suffering from delusional jealousy and could be additional targets for clinical intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease and Tourette's syndrome, primarily manifest during wakefulness, intrude into sleep. There are some disorders, however, such as periodic limb movements in sleep, restless legs syndrome, paroxysmal nocturnal dystonia, bruxism, and somnambulism, which occur primarily during sleep. The diagnosis and management of these disorders pose a challenge to neuropsychiatric practice, not only because they may be difficult to distinguish from other neuropsychiatric disorders, but also because psychiatric disorders are often co-morbid with them. Study of these disorders is necessary for an understanding of the interaction of sleep and movement, and how disturbance in one may affect the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]