Early life stress, resilience and emotional dysregulation in major depressive disorder with comorbid borderline personality disorder.

BACKGROUND: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) show different course and treatment compared to major depressive disorder (MDD). Early life stress may increase BPD onset; however, resilience may play a protective role against the development of psychopathology. The goal of this study was to compare the early life stress, resilience, and the clinical characteristics of emotional dysregulation in patients with MDD with and without comorbid BPD. METHODS: Thirty patients with both BPD and MDD, 25 patients with MDD alone, and 25 age- and sex- matched healthy controls, participated in this study. Analysis of variance was used to compare the early life stress, resilience, and emotional dysregulation among groups. Also, multivariate logistic regression models were used to identify the relationship of the early life stress and resilience domains with BPD comorbidity within MDD patients. RESULTS: The domains of emotional abuse and self-regulation ability were significantly associated with BPD comorbidity and BPD severity. In emotional dysregulation, difficulty scores of impulsivity, coping strategies, and emotion clarity domains were significantly increased in patients with both BPD and MDD compared to patients with MDD alone. LIMITATIONS: The relatively small sample size may contribute to reduce statistical power of investigation. CONCLUSIONS: Emotional abuse experiences in early life, and deficits in self-regulation, are significantly associated with comorbid BPD in patients with MDD. A comprehensive evaluation including early life stress, resilience and emotion regulation ability may help to identify comorbid BPD in patients with MDD and develop treatment strategies.

Nonverbal memory dysfunction in obsessive-compulsive disorder patients with checking compulsions.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a clinically heterogeneous disorder; nonetheless, most of the previous neuropsychological studies for assessing the involvement of memory dysfunction grouped together patients with different symptoms, thereby potentially accounting for the inconsistencies of results. The goals of this study were to compare the memory dysfunction of two main subtypes of OCD and to identify the type of memory dysfunction that is associated with the checking symptoms in OCD patients. The sample population comprised the cleaning-type OCD group (N=23), checking-type OCD group (N=24), and a control group of healthy volunteers (N=20). All the OCD patients were selected from the outpatient clinic. All the subjects underwent the Rey-Osterreith Complex Figure Test (RCFT) for the assessment of nonverbal memory function, the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test (HVLT) for verbal memory function, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R), and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The immediate and delayed memory scores of RCFT were significantly lower in the checking-type OCD group; there were no significant differences in HVLT scores amongst the three groups. Our results indicate that the checking-type compulsion of OCD patients is associated with nonverbal memory deficits and not with verbal memory deficits.