| pubmed-article:616200 | pubmed:abstractText | The conception of a specific association between maturity-onset diabetes and manic-depressive psychosis, on a common basis with diencephalic functional obesity, has been recently taken again in consideration by the psychiatric literature. Investigations on this problem from diabetological point of view have been so far completely lacking, and are proposed with the present study. Symptomatic depressive conditions in diabetes are frequent and should be primarily separated from depressive endogenous psychosis. The pathogenesis of the association between diabetes of the adult-obese type and psychosis might be discussed according to a transactional theoretical model, assuming a positive feed-back mechanism of the two relationships: diabetes-psychosis and psychosis-diabetes. With these criteria, 4 observations of the clinical association were collected out of 274 admissions for diabetes, during 1976. Diabetes is intended as overt diabetes; obesity presented with the stenic picture; psychosis had a monopolar melancholic course. Similar clinical features were characteristic in all cases. The relationship diabetes-psychosis showed no evidence, unless importance should be given to a potential diabetes in 3 cases. On the contrary, the relationship psychosis-diabetes could be demonstrated in the four cases. A psychosomatic scheme connecting the neuro-hormonal correlations to a genetically conditioned exhaustion of the beta-function, is postulated. During melancholic recurrences, diabetes proved to be insulin-dependent and even insulin-resistent in 2 cases. Tricyclic antidepressant theraphy did not modify the metabolic situation. | lld:pubmed |
