People with symptoms of pathological gambling and kleptomania, regardless of severity, seem to have a very poor quality of life, reported Jon Grant, M.D., of Brown University, Providence, R.I., and Suck-Won Kim, M.D., of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Their study comprised three groups. A group of 30 kleptomania patients included 18 women and had a mean age of 42 years. The pathological gambling group had 43 patients, 18 of them women, with a mean age of 45 years. The control group consisted of 30 adults (15 women) with a mean age of 40 (Compr. Psychiatry 2005;46:34–7).
No correlation was seen between quality of life scores and age, gender, marital status, and current comorbidity. Kleptomania and gambling patients scored significantly lower on the Quality of Life Inventory, compared with controls. No kleptomania patients and only one gambling patient reported a high quality of life, and a very low quality of life was reported by 43% of kleptomania subjects. No correlation was seen between symptom severity and quality of life scores.
Kleptomania patients may have had such low scores because they struggle with the symptoms of their illness as well as with legal and moral repercussions. The researchers said that prior poor quality of life might have raised the risk of developing kleptomania and pathological gambling. Study participants saw the behaviors as causing their dissatisfaction and believed quality of life would improve if their disorders were better controlled.