Symptom exaggeration and symptom validity testing in persons with medically unexplained neurologic presentations

Development of a symptom validity index to assist in identifying ADHD symptom exaggeration or feigning.

OBJECTIVE Concerns have been identified regarding the ease with which students and young adults can feign or exaggerate symptoms of ADHD, and no formal measures exist to identify such behavior when it occurs. This article describes the development and initial validation of a new symptom validity measure designed to detect feigned or exaggerated ADHD symptom reporting. METHOD Employing items f...

The latent structure of cognitive symptom exaggeration on the Victoria Symptom Validity Test.

Previous studies have focused on the ability of cognitive symptom validity tests to identify simulated malingering or distinguish between clinical samples of individuals at low or high risk of cognitive symptom exaggeration. However, no published studies have examined the latent structure of negative response bias on cognitive tests: measures of cognitive symptom exaggeration may evaluate a con...

Effort Testing and Symptom Exaggeration Testing Are Essential in Assessing Patients with Fibromyalgia for Disability.

Symptom validity testing, effort, and neuropsychological assessment.

Symptom validity testing (SVT) has become a major theme of contemporary neuropsychological research. However, many issues about the meaning and interpretation of SVT findings will require the best in research design and methods to more precisely characterize what SVT tasks measure and how SVT test findings are to be used in neuropsychological assessment. Major clinical and research issues are o...

Association of costs with somatic symptom severity in patients with medically unexplained symptoms.

OBJECTIVE To analyse the association of direct and indirect costs in patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) with somatic symptom severity (SSS). METHODS A cross-sectional cost analysis for retrospective 6 months was conducted in 294 primary care patients with MUS. Health care utilisation and loss of productivity were measured by questionnaires. SSS was measured using the "Patient ...