Do depressive patients with family history of dementia constitute a separate group? A case report study

INTRODUCTION: Recently it has been suggested that patients with both depres sion and a family history of dementia are seven times as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as are controls. METHOD: Fifty patients aged 21 - 60 years suffering from DSM-IV Major Depre ssion entered the study; three of them (6%) had a positive family history o f dementia. Diagnosis was by SCAN v 2.0. The family history method was used to record family history. All depressed patients were investigated with th e Dexamethasone Suppression Test (DST), brain SPECT, electro-oculogram (EOG ), flash-electroretinogram (f-ERG) and Pattern-Reversal Visual Evoked Poten tials (PR-VEPs). Student's t-test was used to analyse the results. RESULTS: All patients with positive family history had atypical features. T wo of them suffered from borderline personality disorder, in comparison to Eight in the remainder of the sample and five in the rest of the atypicals. The age of onset of depression was lower. DST, SPECT, EOG and PR-VEPs find ings were similar between groups. The only significant finding concerned th e latentcy of the bs wave of the scotopic ERG (P<0.01), but even in this, p atients with positive history did not differ from the rest of the atypical patients, CONCLUSION: The present study provided limited data connecting atypical fea tures of depression, personality traits, psychological stressors, hypercort isolaemia and family history of dementia. Further research with larger samp les is essential.