Diagnosis of adult psychiatric patients with childhood hyperactivity.

The authors compared 48 adult psychiatric patients (27 men and 21 women) who had been hyperactive as children with two groups of patients who had not. Both comparison groups were matched for age and sex and the second was also matched for economic status. Although closer matching narrowed the gap somewhat, the formerly hyperactive subjects still showed significantly more personality disorder of all types, more sociopathy, more alcoholism, and less affective disorder than controls. Schizophrenia and drug abuse occurred no more often in these subjects than in the comparison groups.