De invloed van traumatische levenservaringen op het ontstaan van psychotische symptomen in patiënten met een bipolaire 1 stoornis

Abstract

Introduction Research done over the past decades has confirmed there to be a relationship between traumatic life events and the development of psychosis in psychiatric patients with schizophrenia. Based on research that has proved there to be symptomatological, epidemiological and genetic overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar 1 disorder (bp1) this research has investigated whether a relationship between traumatic life events and the development of psychosis could also be found for psychiatric patients with bp1. Furthermore, the possibility of a relationship between childhood trauma and the development of psychosis in patients with bipolar 1 disorder was investigated. Methods Information of 100 probands with psychotic symptoms, 29 probands without psychotic symptoms, and 41 healthy controls was used. All participants were given 2 questionnaires (LSC-r (Wolfe, Kimmerling, Brown, Chrestman & Levin, 1996) and the Dutch version of the CTQ (Bernstein, Fink, Handelsman & Foote, 1994)). To determine whether the probands had experienced psychotic symptoms they were given The CASH (Andreasen, Flaum & Arndt, 1992). Non-parametric tests, Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney, were used to analyse the hypotheses. Results A significant difference was found between bp1 patients with psychotic symptoms and healthy controls and between bp1 patients without psychotic symptoms and healthy controls. No difference was found between bp1 with psychotic symptoms and bp1 without psychotic symptoms. Also, no significant difference was found between the number of childhood traumas experienced by healthy controls, bp1 patients with psychotic symptoms, and bp1 patients without psychotic symptoms. Interpretation The results suggest that there may be no relationship between the number of stressful life events or the number of childhood traumas experienced and the development of the positive symptoms of psychosis.