Affective temperaments: familiality and clinical use in mood disorders.

Background: The affective temperament profiles among patients with mood disorders may be an important parameter in the clinical evaluation of these patients. It has been proposed that temperament traits have familiality and may represent vulnerability markers to identify the risk to developing specific clinical type of mood disorders. To test these theories, measures of temperament were examined in bipolar patients (BP), unipolar major depressive patients (UP), healthy relatives of these patients (HRP) and normal controls (NC).

Methods: We compared affective temperament scores, using the brief Brazilian version of TEMPS-A--TEMPS-Rio de Janeiro, between 90 BP, 88 UP, 132 HRP and 136 NC. A MANCOVA model was constructed. Dependent variables were the six subscales of the TEMPS-RJ (depressive, cyclothymic, irritable, hyperthymic, anxious and worrying temperaments). The effects of age and gender were adjusted as covariates. Furthermore, we performed a comparison between a subgroup of 68 HRP, relatives of bipolar patients (HRBP), and the remainders 64 HRP, relatives of unipolar patients (HRUP) and controls.

Results: The clinical group (BP, UP) showed higher temperament scores than NC, except for hyperthymic scores. BP showed higher cyclothymic (p<0.001), hyperthymic (p<0.001) and lower anxious (p<0.01) temperament scores than UP. HRP showed lower scores than clinical groups. HRBP scored higher cyclothymic subscale than HRUP and NC groups.

Limitations: Bipolar I and II subjects were placed in the same group.

Conclusions: The cyclothymic and hyperthymic traits were associated with bipolarity in patients and cyclothymic temperament could be a characteristic trait of the healthy relatives of bipolar patients. Our data support that affective temperament might become a useful tool for clinical evaluation and research purposes in mood disorders.