Impact of psychiatric disturbance on identifying psychiatric disorder in relatives: study of mothers and daughters.

Previous studies have suggested that collecting psychiatric data on relatives in family studies by asking probands to provide information on them leads to a bias in estimates of morbidity risk, because probands'accounts are influenced by their own psychiatric histories. We investigated this in a UK sample and found that daughters'anxiety disorder histories did not influence their reports of anxiety disorder in mothers, but their history of mood disorder/alcohol dependence made them more sensitive in predicting mood disorder/alcohol dependence in mothers.