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A New Depression Scale Designed to be Sensitive to Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Stuart A. Montgomery  and
Marie Åsberg
Stuart A. Montgomery*
Affiliation:
Academic Department of Psychiatry, Guy's Hospital Medical School, London, S.E.I
Marie Åsberg
Affiliation:
Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
*
∗Correspondence.
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Summary

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 inter-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.

Type
Papers
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 134 , Issue 4 , April 1979 , pp. 382 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1979 

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