The relationship between parental diagnosis, offspring temperament and offspring psychopathology: a longitudinal analysis

Background: The study examines the relationship between child temperament and a diagnosis of anxiety and/or depression as an adult and what influence parent psychopathology may have on the temperament-diagnosis relationship. Methods: The sample consists of 151 offspring who were initially selected as being at high or low risk for major depression on the basis of the presence or absence of a lifetime history of MDD in their parents. The parents and offspring were independently interviewed with a modified version of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia-Lifetime (Mannuzza et al., 1986) and completed a battery of instruments which included the Dimensions of Temperament Survey (Lerner et al., 1982). They were interviewed three times during the course of the study: Time 1, Time 2, and Time 10. Results: There is a similar distribution of offspring disorders in the same parental diagnostic groups. There is a significant temperamental difference between the offspring of parents with a single disorder in comparison to offspring of parents with comorbid disorder. The former is characterized by significantly greater levels of adaptability/ approachability. Low attention span at Time 1 is significantly predictive of an offspring lifetime diagnosis of major depression controlling for ADHD in comparison to offspring with neither disorder. Greater irritability, higher activity level and lower adaptability at Time 1 were significantly predictive of offspring lifetime diagnosis of comorbid disorder in comparison to the MDD only group. Limitations: This is a retrospective cohort study using a temperament measure from Time 1 versus lifetime diagnoses and consisting of a relatively small sample size for several of the diagnostic categories. Conclusions: There appears to be a link between parental psychopathology and offspring temperament. The data also provide further support for the notion that comorbid anxiety and depression disorder is a distinct entity in comparison to MDD only and new evidence that it may be predicted by a specific underlying temperament profile. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.