Grading depression severity by symptom scores: is it a valid method for subclassifying depressive disorders?
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T Kitamura1, Y Nakagawa, S Machizawa
1National Institute of Mental Health, Ichikawa, Japan.
Abstract:
Recent diagnostic criteria such as the DSM-III-R and the 10th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) have proposed that depression should be subcategorized according to severity. Among 75 inpatients with Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC) major depressive disorder, the total number of criterion B items (N = 8) used as the measure of severity was validated against the global assessment scale (GAS) score for the worst week of the episode; the correlation between the two was r = -.232. This suggests that even if the total number of identified diagnostic items reflects a different aspect of severity, there should be caution about its use unless validated by further study.