[Symptom check-lists in the diagnosis and epidemiology of neurotic disorders]

Epidemiological studies related to the occurrence of neurotic disorders commonly use symptom check-lists. The results of such studies depend on, amongst others, the construction of the questionnaire and especially on the specification of the value of the questionnaire (GSI) which is determined as the boundary between the "psychophysiological" or organic symptoms and neurotic symptoms. A control study was carried out on the norms of two symptom checklists which have been used for many years in Poland: SCL-"S" (73 symptoms), most often diagnosed in neurotic patients, at the time of constructing the questionnaire and the SCL-"O" (the same 73 + 62 other symptoms). The criterion population was made up of 843 untreated subjects and 2026 patients of day-hospitals. The norms specified by the method of finding the "optimal cut-off point" were approx. 5% in the SCL-"S" and 3% in the SCL-"O" higher for the cohort of women than for men. According to those norms, about 30% of the untreated population gains the same result of Global Severity Index (GSI) as about 90% of patients treated for neurotic disorders and could be diagnosed as neurotic disorders. The GSI norms for the SCL-"S" more often indicated the existence of these disorders in the group of untreated women than in the men's group, while the norms of SCL-"O" indicate a similar frequency of the disease independently of the gender. The symptom frequency analysis presenting differences in the women (1165 ss.) and men (861 ss.) patient groups and lead also to the hypothesis on the dependency of such epidemiological data on the construction of the symptom check-lists--especially the number of variables concerning symptoms more frequent in the female and/or in the male populations.