Personality and cerebrospinal fluid monoamine metabolites in alcoholics and controls

Alcoholics as a group have been consistently reported to show differences from controls on various personality inventories. Moreover, neurobiologic substrates have been postulated to underlie personality dimensions. Therefore, we compared alcoholics with controls on measures of personality and investigated relationships between measures of personality and cerebrospinal fluid monoamine metabolite concentrations. The alcoholics were significantly different from controls on many personality measurements. There were significant, negative correlations between interview-derived lifetime aggression scores and cerebrospinal fluid concentrations of both the serotonin metabolite 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid and the dopamine metabolite homovanillic acid. However, there were no significant correlations between any cerebrospinal fluid monoamine metabolite concentrations and scores on personality inventories.