206
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: not found
      • Article: not found

      A new depression scale designed to be sensitive to change

      ,
      The British Journal of Psychiatry
      Royal College of Psychiatrists

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The construction of a depression rating scale designed to be particularly sensitive to treatment effects is described. Ratings of 54 English and 52 Swedish patients on a 65 item comprehensive psychopathology scale were used to identify the 17 most commonly occurring symptoms in primary depressive illness in the combined sample. Ratings on these 17 items for 64 patients participating in studies of four different antidepressant drugs were used to create a depression scale consisting of the 10 items which showed the largest changes with treatment and the highest correlation to overall change. The inner-rater reliability of the new depression scale was high. Scores on the scale correlated significantly with scores on a standard rating scale for depression, the Hamilton Rating Scale (HRS), indicating its validity as a general severity estimate. Its capacity to differentiate between responders and non-responders to antidepressant treatment was better than the HRS, indicating greater sensitivity to change. The practical and ethical implications in terms of smaller sample sizes in clinical trials are discussed.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          The British Journal of Psychiatry
          The British Journal of Psychiatry
          Royal College of Psychiatrists
          0007-1250
          April 01 1979
          April 01 1979
          : 134
          : 4
          : 382-389
          Article
          10.1192/bjp.134.4.382
          444788
          5d59440a-355c-458f-b98f-833273c5eeaf
          © 1979
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article