BACKGROUND Late-life depression is a common, chronic and recurring disorder for which guidelines recommend long-term therapy. The safety and efficacy of duloxetine for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD) were evaluated using data from elderly patients (age > or = 65 years; n = 101) who participated in a large, multinational, open-label study. METHODS Patients meeting DSM-IV crite...

Treatment satisfaction of different mental disorders is still poorly understood, but of high clinical interest. Inpatients of a general psychiatric care hospital were asked to fill out questionnaires on satisfaction and clinical variables at admission and discharge. On the basis of an exploratory approach, differences in treatment satisfaction among diagnostic groups were examined by means of o...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to validate the psychotic depression assessment scale (PDAS), which includes the six-item melancholia subscale from the Hamilton depression rating scale (HAMD-6) and the five-item psychosis subscale from the brief psychiatric rating scale (BPRS-5). Data from the Clinical Research Center for Depression (CRESCEND) study, which is a 52-week naturalistic trial, w...

BACKGROUND Despite the widespread use of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), the clinical meaning of its total score and cut-off values used to define treatment response are unclear. AIMS To link the BPRS to Clinical Global Impression (CGI) ratings. METHOD Equipercentile linking of BPRS and CGI ratings from seven drug trials in acutely ill patients with schizophrenia (n=1979). RESU...

Duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) has emerged as a reliable predictor of outcome but continues to remain under scientific scrutiny. The present study examines the effect of differential periods of DUP on long-term outcome of first episode schizophrenia at Mumbai, India. This research was a prospective, 10-year follow-up naturalistic study. Hospitalized patients of first episode schizophreni...

Objective The study's aim was to develop and standardize a Korean version of the University of California San Diego Performance-based Skills Assessment (K-UPSA), which is used to evaluate the daily living function of patients with schizophrenia. Methods Study participants were 78 patients with schizophrenia and 27 demographically matched healthy controls. We evaluated the clinical states and ...

OBJECTIVE It is uncertain how reliably clinicians apply clinical predictors of group A beta hemolytic streptococcal pharyngitis (GABHSP) to form a clinical impression, and how reliably this impression predicts culture results. The objective was to study clinician accuracy in diagnosing GABHSP. METHODS This was a prospective cohort study, conducted at an urgent care center of a major universit...