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Biomedical subjects

D R Langbehn

Publications and source records attributed to D R Langbehn.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

Relationship between service effectiveness and satisfaction among persons receiving Medicaid mental health services.

Relationships between service satisfaction, life satisfaction, and self-reported mental health status were examined for Iowa Medicaid mental health service recipients. Of the 16,579 persons who received services in 1993, a mail-out survey was sent to 2,520 persons and returned by 815 (32.3 percent). Persons with schizophrenia reported greater service satisfaction and life satisfaction than persons with other diagnoses, and their ratings of their mental health were higher. A relationship between service satisfaction and current life satisfaction was observed for persons with schizophrenia, affective disorder and adjustment disorder, but not for persons with anxiety disorder.

Adult

The Iowa Personality Disorder Screen: development and preliminary validation of a brief screening interview.

The length and expense of comprehensive personality disorder interviews makes them unwieldy for routine use. A brief but sensitive screen could eliminate administration of longer instruments in many instances. We describe the development of the Iowa Personality Disorder Screen (IPDS)--a mini-structured interview which can be completed in less than 5 minutes. Retrospective analyses using 1,203 SIDP-R interviews suggested that the IPDS items should provide good sensitivity and specificity. We present results from a prospective validation study, using a mixed group of 52 nonpsychotic inpatients and outpatients who were diagnosed using the SIDP-IV. Blind administration of the IPDS yielded excellent sensitivity (92%) and good specificity (79%), using a subset of five screening items. Addition of two more items leads to an estimated sensitivity of 79% and specificity of 86%. The IPDS shows promise as a quick personality disorder screen for use in research settings or standard clinical interviews.

Adult

Distinct contributions of conduct and oppositional defiant symptoms to adult antisocial behavior: evidence from an adoption study.

BACKGROUND: We conducted an exploratory multivariate analysis of juvenile behavior symptoms in an adoption data set. One goal was to see if a few DSM-interpretable symptom dimensions economically captured information within the data. A second goal was to study the relationships between any such dimensions, biological and environmental background, and eventual adult antisocial behavior. METHODS: The data originated from a retrospective adoption study. Probands with a biological background for parental antisocial personality or alcoholism were heavily oversampled. Symptoms were ascertained by proband and adoptive parent interview. We performed, by gender, orthogonal rotated principal component analyses of juvenile behavior disturbance symptoms (females, n = 87; males, n = 88). We used structural equation modeling to examine the relationships hypothesized above. RESULTS: For both genders, an oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) component and at least 1 conduct component emerged. Regardless of the conduct component scores, the ODD components were significant predictors of adult antisocial behavior. For males, the ODD component was predicted by an antisocial biological background, but not by scores on the Adverse Adoptive Environment Scale. The conduct components were predicted by adoptive environment alone. For females, biological background or biological-environmental interactions predicted each of the components. CONCLUSIONS: There has been little previous distinction between conduct disorder and ODD in studies of genetic and environmental influences on juvenile behavior. The study suggests that adolescent ODD symptoms may be a distinct antecedent of adult antisocial personality. In males, adolescent ODD symptoms may represent early expression of genetic sociopathic personality traits.

Adolescent

Discriminant analysis using the unweighted sum of binary variables: a comparison of model selection methods.

Many clinical decision-making rules are equivalent to linear discriminant functions that involve the unweighted sum of binary variables (SBV). We briefly consider the geometry of this restriction and then propose a number of methods for forward stepwise selection of SBV models. Using a simulation study, we compare the performance of these methods under a wide range of plausible conditions and show that no single method is uniformly superior for selecting models of a fixed size. Factors of general importance in relative method performance are the ratio of sample size to the number of candidate variables and the class-conditional moment structure of the data. We conclude by offering some practical strategies for SBV model construction.

Computer Simulation

Clinical correlates of self-mutilation among psychiatric inpatients.

The charts of 660 consecutive admissions to a university psychiatric hospital were examined. After excluding those with mental retardation, 32 patients who had mutilated themselves and 88 patients admitted for unsuccessful suicide attempts were identified. Women were significantly overrepresented among the mutilators, but the groups did not differ with respect to age. Most analyses were restricted to women, of whom 27 were self-mutilators and 51 were nonmutilating suicide attempters. Mutilators were less likely to receive diagnoses of major depression or adjustment disorder but were more likely to have a history of substance abuse and receive Axis II diagnoses. The mutilative behavior was generally repetitive. The most common form was superficial cutting of the arms and wrists. Reports of lifetime sexual or physical abuse were more common among mutilators. Mutilators also had frequent histories of suicide attempts distinct from their mutilation behavior, multiple hospitalizations, and transfer to state hospitals for longer-term care. These findings suggest a chronic course with significant morbidity and associated features which may be of clinical significance.

Adult

Health Attitude Survey. A scale for assessing somatizing patients.

The authors designed an instrument, the Health Attitude Survey, to assess somatization, and administered it to over 1,000 patients attending a general medicine clinic. Within this population, a series of somatizing patients and control patients were identified for purposes of developing and testing the instrument. The 27-item scale was rapidly administered and acceptable to the patients. Based on comparisons with other measures of somatization, the instrument appeared to be a valid measure of the attitudes and perceptions of somatizing patients, and it distinguished these patients from the control subjects. The measure showed acceptable predictive value and may prove useful in clinical settings, where rapid screening is desired.

Adult