Personality and duodenal ulcer response to antisecretory treatment

Two groups of duodenal ulcer (DU) patients, responders and nonresponders, have been compared in order to verify if psychological factors are linked to relapse. Responders are defined as those patients who on endoscopy did not present proven relapse during treatment with maintenance doses of antisecretory drugs (cimetidine 400 mg/day, ranitidine 150 mg/day, pirenzepine 50 mg/day) for a period of 12 months after healing of the lesion. Nonresponders were all patients presenting with at least one relapse during treatment with antisecretory drugs. One hundred and twelve DU patients (81 responders, 31 nonresponders) were examined with the Cattell 16 Personality Factors Questionnaire (16PF) form C. There were no significant differences between the two groups for age, sex, duration of illness and type of drug treatment. The 16 PF scores of responders and nonresponders were not statistically different except in the case of factor E (dominance), in which the nonresponder subjects scored higher than responder subjects (p less than 0.01). However, when the significance level was corrected for the number of variables involved, the above finding is not considered to be meaningful.