Personality disorders according to DSM-III-R and thrombocyte monoamine oxidase activity in type 1 and type 2 alcoholics.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Several criteria used to distinguish type 2 alcoholics from Type 1 alcoholics, as well as the incidence of lower platelet monoamine oxidase (MAO) activity in the former group, would indicate that personality disorders might be more common in Type 2 alcoholics. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relation between personality disorders, according to DSM-III-R, platelet MAO activity and Type 1/Type 2 alcoholism. METHOD: The occurrence of personality disorders, according to DSM-III-R, was studied in a series of 34 male inpatients with alcohol dependence, subclassified into Type 1 (n = 18) and Type 2 (n = 16). Platelet MAO activity was studied in the same series of patients. RESULTS: Patients with Type 2 alcoholism had significantly higher frequencies of self-defeating, schizotypal, antisocial and borderline personality disorders than Type 1 alcoholics. Patients with Type 2 alcoholism had significantly lower mean activity of platelet MAO than Type 1 alcoholics. No correlation was found between platelet MAO activity and personality disorders according to DSM-III-R. CONCLUSIONS: Disorders of the antisocial personality and borderline personality types as well as low platelet MAO can all predict the occurrence of Type 2 alcoholism with rather high specificity but with a comparatively low degree of sensitivity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 55 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.