Family History Studies. II Sex Differences and Alcoholism in Primary Affective Illness

Abstract

In previous communications (6, 9) we have presented data indicating that affective disorder (manic depressive disease, involutional depressive reaction, neurotic depressive reaction, psychotic depressive reaction) is more frequent in females than in males. More specifically, in a total sample of 366 affective disorder probands there was a ratio of 1·9 females to every male; and in the parents of the probands a statistically significant excess of mothers as compared to fathers was found to have suffered from the same illness. Calculations done on the same proband group revealed that alcoholism was significantly more prevalent in the fathers and siblings of the affective disorder group than in a matched control series. It appeared that if one added the alcoholic fathers to the affectively disordered fathers one found a prevalence of psychiatric illness in fathers which was similar to the prevalence of affective disorder itself in the mothers. Thus, it seemed that the deficiency in affective disorder diagnoses in fathers was made up by alcoholism.