[Methodological problems of clinical trials of psychotropic drugs (author's transl)].

Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten
H Heimann

Abstract

Up to now, clinical studies only succeeded in differentiating between great categories of psychotropic drugs, but failed to prove finer differences of effects within these categories of substances. Two points of the testing-method are discussed: 1. problems which arise when rating pathological behaviour and 2. problems of sampling psychiatric patients. A great part of symptoms that clinicians and psychologists used to consider as relevant proved to be extremely rare. Total scores cannot be taken as a measure of the therapeutic effect, because they don't express adequately the degree of severity of the illness before and after treatment, and there is a symptom that is independent from the observer, i.e. the frequency of the symptom in different clinical pictures. The frequency is an inverse ratio to the specificity of the symptom. It is then argued that even in clinical studies, it would be possible to choose among the variety of descriptive symptoms those which fulfil requirements of the probabilistic test-model of Rasch and to take only those symptoms to characterize the degree of severity of psychic disturbance in trials with psychotropic drugs. Conclusions are then drawn from a study including three groups of physicians (spe...Continue Reading

References

May 1, 1974·Pharmakopsychiatrie, Neuro-Psychopharmakologie·H Heimann
Jul 1, 1974·Pharmakopsychiatrie, Neuro-Psychopharmakologie·J AngstR Rothweiler
Mar 1, 1970·Psychosomatic Medicine·S Epstein, M Coleman

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Citations

Jan 1, 1979·British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology·D Koeppen
Jan 1, 1985·European Archives of Psychiatry and Neurological Sciences·W MaierA Gerken

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