Acute Porphyria Presenting with Mental Symptoms

Abstract

Acute porphyria is a rare disease in this country. Although a typical case was described in the Journal of Mental Science over 50 years ago (Campbell, 1898), Petrie (1948) could find only three cases reported in Britain between 1940 and 1948; since then at least six more cases have been reported. The disease is relatively common in Scandinavia and, to a less extent, in North America—a distribution for which Discombe (1948) has suggested an explanation in terms of relative emigration rates.