BACKGROUND Co-occurrence of bulimia nervosa and borderline personality disorder has been attributed to shared factors, including childhood abuse and disturbances in central serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine; 5-HT) mechanisms. To explore this notion, we conducted a controlled assessment of childhood abuse and 5-HT function in bulimics with and without borderline personality disorder. METHOD Forty...

Etiological models of social anxiety disorder (SAD) suggest that early childhood trauma contributes to the development of this disorder. However, surprisingly little is known about the link between different forms of childhood trauma and adult clinical symptoms in SAD. This study (1) compared levels of childhood trauma in adults with generalized SAD versus healthy controls (HCs), and (2) examin...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of traumas and the presence of childhood anxiety disorders in adult patients with social phobia and investigate their influence on the presentation of the disorder. METHODS Twenty-four adult patients with social phobia were asked about the presence of trauma before the age of 16. The K-SADS-E and the DICA-P interviews were used to...

OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between childhood maltreatment and eating disorders in a sample of children. METHOD Twenty 10-15-year-old female children who were receiving treatment following reported childhood sexual abuse and 20 age-matched controls were compared on a series of measures assessing eating disorder behaviors, body image concerns, substance use, mood, impulsive behavior,...

Research has accumulated over the past several years demonstrating a relationship between childhood abuse and anxiety disorders. Extant studies have generally suffered from a number of methodological limitations, including low sample sizes and without controlling for psychiatric comorbidity and parental anxiety. In addition, research has neglected to examine whether the relationships between an...

OBJECTIVE No published studies have examined childhood abuse and neglect in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). This study examined the prevalence and clinical correlates of abuse and neglect in individuals with this disorder. METHODS Seventy-five subjects (69.3% female, mean age=35.4+/-12.0) with DSM-IV BDD completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and were interviewed with other reliable and...

BACKGROUND   While associations between conduct disorder (CD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and interpersonal callousness (IC) symptoms and delinquency onset are well established, less is known about whether these characteristics differentiate desisting and persisting delinquency. The current study examined whether childhood and adolescen...

Childhood attentional and neuromotor precursors of social competence and affective deficits in adolescents at risk for schizophrenia, adolescents at risk for affective disorder, and matched comparison adolescents were examined. The subjects were offspring of parents with schizophrenia or affective disorder and of normal parents matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status from the New York Hig...

BACKGROUND There is limited understanding of the symptomatic development of bipolar disorder from childhood to early adulthood. AIMS We assessed whether borderline personality disorder traits, ADHD, and emotional, behavioural and social difficulties during childhood were associated with hypomania assessed in young adulthood. METHOD We used data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents an...

To evaluate a developmental psychopathology approach for understanding adolescent social anxiety, parent-reported predictors of social anxiety were examined in a nonclinical sample of adolescents. Structured diagnostic interviews were obtained from biological parents of 770 participants. Potential risk factors assessed included child characteristics: negative affect, shyness, separation anxiety...