Antisocial alcoholic patients show as much improvement at 14-month follow-up as non-antisocial alcoholic patients

The authors investigated the impact of DSM-III-R adult criteria for antisoc ial personality disorder (and co-occurrence of childhood conduct or mood di sorder) on one-year changes of multi-domain problem severity in 309 alcohol ic patients. Adult antisocial traits were associated with more drug, legal, and psychiatric problems at baseline and with more drug problems at follow -up. However, patients with antisocial traits showed at least as much impro vement from baseline through follow-up as their non-antisocial counterparts . Furthermore, the co-occurrence of childhood conduct disorder or mood diso rder among the antisocial alcoholics did not define prognostically relevant subgroups. These findings suggest that antisocial alcoholics benefit from treatment at least as much as non-antisocial alcoholics.