Antinuclear antibodies in psychiatric patients.

To investigate whether unrecognized systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) might occur more frequently among psychiatric patients than expected on clinical examination, sera of 100 patients from a psychiatric hospital were tested for the presence of antibodies against nuclear antigens (ANA) and antibodies against DNA. The occurrence of sera positive for ANA was compared with the test results of serum samples of 859 individuals randomly selected from the general population. Positive tests for ANA were found in 7% of the psychiatric patients and 4% of the individuals selected from the population. Antibodies against dsDNA were not found in sera of the psychiatric patients. After categorizing both groups for age and sex, no difference was found as for the frequency of ANA positive sera between both groups, indicating that on the basis of serology, no evidence exists that SLE might be underestimated among psychiatric patients.