[Personality test and prediction of antidepressive treatment effect in mental illness]. / Personlighedstest og praediktion af antidepressiv behandlingseffekt ved psykisk sygdom.

INTRODUCTION: The STAR*D project showed that standard treatment of patients with major depression with citalopram resulted in a 36.8% remission in a group of patients. A switch to or supplementing with cognitive therapy substantially increased the remission rate. It would be desirable to identify in advance those patients in whom adjuvant therapy would be of a special benefit. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Answers to questions about personality traits (Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI)) were gathered from a mixed group of hospitalized and ambulant Danish psychiatric patients (n = 63) and matched with answers to questions on quality of life and degree of depression (Major Depression Inventory (MDI)). The hospitalized patients answered those questions again when discharged. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to evaluate the quality of the questions with regard to their information on latent categories and dimensions. RESULTS: A number of the questions were of low quality and could be omitted in this group of patients. The revised personality profile showed that patients with a higher score for harm avoidance also had a higher depression score measured at discharge from the hospital or during ambulant treatment. CONCLUSION: The TCI screening identifies a group of patients that have a high risk of getting a limited antidepressive treatment effect. An adjuvant intervention to the psychopharmacologic treatment could be offered, e.g. cognitive therapy.

Pheomelanin and eumelanin in human skin determined by high-performance liquid chromatography and its relation to in vivo reflectance measurements.

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Clinical experience has shown that red haired, fair-skinned people have an increased frequency of skin cancer and in addition a relatively high content of pheomelanin and low content of eumelanin in their skin. Of these, eumelanin is presumed photoprotective, and pheomelanin phototoxic. Thus, a fast, easy, and non-invasive method for determining skin content of eumelanin and pheomelanin was sought. METHODS: Skin reflectance measurements using a UV-Optimize apparatus were performed before taking suction blisters of the same skin area. Each skin sample was freeze dried and submitted to alkaline hydrogen peroxide degradation. Two eumelanin degradation compounds:Pyrrole-2,3-dicarboxylic acid (PDCA) and pyrrole-2,3,5-tricarboxylic acid (PTCA), and two pheomelanin degradation compounds: Thiazole-4,5-dicarboxylic acid (TDCA) and 1,3-thiazole-2,4,5-tricarboxylic acid (TTCA) were determined in a single chromatographic analysis. Each degradation compound was correlated to reflectance measurements of red (660 nm), green (555 nm), and blue (488 nm) light and additionally correlated to the pigmentation % and redness % given by UV-Optimize. RESULTS: Neither of the investigated parameters were significantly correlated to either PDCA or TTCA. Contrarily, a highly significant correlation was found for the eumelanin marker, PTCA (r2=0.79, P<0.0001). The pheomelanin marker, TDCA, was likewise found to be significantly correlated (r2=0.43, P<0.0001). CONCLUSION: Based on the coefficients of determination it was concluded that in vivo spectrophotometric reflectance measurements of human skin were highly useful for determining the eumelanin content of skin and to classify the pheomelanin content of skin non-invasively. This may be used individually and in population-based studies.