Cognition and nondysphoric depression among adoptees at high risk for psychopathology
Section snippets
Subjects
The subjects in the present study were selected from a parent sample of 330 volunteer adoptees interviewed during years 2004 to 2008 in the context of a study examining the effects of substance use diagnoses on cognition [27], [28], [29]. At initial recruitment, half of the sample had birth parent(s) identified as having substance abuse problems and/or antisocial behaviors, and neither of the birth parents had problems for the other half of the sample. During the current follow-up, one third of
Sample description
Twenty subjects with NDD, 89 with DD, and 109 nondepressed comparisons were identified. Frequencies of DSM-IV depressive symptoms by group are shown in Table 1. The most common symptoms among subjects with NDD were worthlessness or guilt (95%), change in sleep patterns (80%), and fatigue (65%). Demographic variables are shown in Table 2. Analysis of variance showed no significant differences between groups for current age (F2,n = 223 = 2.0; P = .138) and years of education (F2,n = 223 = 2.0; P
Discussion
The present study examined associations between dysphoric (DD) and nondysphoric (NDD) depression with premorbid and concurrent cognitive abilities in a sample of adult adoptees from the Iowa Adoption Study [22]. Nondysphoric depression is a subsyndromal (ie, not meeting DSM-IV criteria for major depression or other unipolar conditions) depressive condition [12], [21] that has been posited to be a phenomenological variant of depression in individuals with limited capacity to perceive and express
Acknowledgment
The authors have no conflict of interest to disclose, which is relevant to the content of this article. Dr Paradiso was supported by the Edward J. Mallinckrodt Jr. Foundation, the Dana Foundation, and an National Institutes of Health Career development award (5K23AG027837). Dr Tranel was supported, in part, by Program Project Grant NINDS NS19632 and NIDA DA022549. Dr Caspers and data collection was supported by a National Institutes of Health grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (RO1
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