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KENNETH S. KENDLER, MD
Department of Psychiatry Medical College of Virginia PO Box 710 Richmond, VA 23298

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1986;43(7):714-715.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.—

I agree with Dr Hayward's main conclusion; our study¹ suggests that the presence of affective illness in a family member should not generally cause a careful diagnosis of schizophrenia to be questioned. However, current information suggests that we can be considerably more confident in this statement for unipolar than for bipolar illness. Our recent study clearly shows that, using DSM-III criteria, being related to a schizophrenic patient neither protects from nor predisposes to major depression.¹ This finding is consistent with our previous results from the Copenhagen sample of the Danish adoption study² and the results of a controlled family study recently reported by Baron et al.³

However, in the same study¹ we found that bipolar illness was more common in relatives of schizophrenic patients than in relatives of controls. Whether this finding, which was of borderline statistical significance, results from the difficulty . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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