Outcome measurement considerations: pharmacological treatments for substance abuse.

Six questions are presented to systematically guide investigators’ decisions on outcome assessment for randomized clinical trials of pharmacological agents for substance-related disorders (American Psychiatric Association 1994). Use of the questions is illustrated by applying them to cocaine dependence. The questions were distilled from four sources: the author’s experience conducting psychiatric treatment outcome research, the extensive literature on treatment outcome methodology (Kazdin 1994), a recent comprehensive text on the clinical evaluation of psychotropic drugs (Prien and Robinson 1994), and Kraemer and Telch’s (1992) paper on outcome measurement for clinical trials.