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Does heroin addiction makes temperamental changes?

Background

Investigation of specific personality traits is still in focus of modern psychiatry for years. The target usually pursues identification of those personality traits, described as a predisposition of addiction. But the question of fowl and egg is still open: are these traits are predispositions or they are consequences of Heroin personality change. Based on "mathematical" admission that temperamental traits describe an unchangeable basic concept we verify our hypothesis over addicted population.

Materials and methods

Heroin addicted and healthy group was assessed with TEMPS-A questionnaire to evaluate statistical significant differences between groups. 50 Heroin addicted and 50 healthy controls were engaged in this research. The target group includes in-patients hospitalized for heroin dependency treatment. Patients with concomitant psychiatric or organic mental disorder were excluded from enrolment. Healthy controls were randomly selected.

Results

The results demonstrate statistically significant differences between groups by "depressive" and "irritable" temperaments.

Conclusions

This study doesn't have ambition to give the right answer for the big question about predispositions or consequences, but it may be gives idea for the right questions.

References

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Martinova, H., Donchev, T., Milanova, V. et al. Does heroin addiction makes temperamental changes?. Ann Gen Psychiatry 9 (Suppl 1), S141 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-859X-9-S1-S141

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-859X-9-S1-S141

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