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J Piacentini

Publications and source records attributed to J Piacentini.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

The Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children-Revised Version (DISC-R): II. Test-retest reliability.

OBJECTIVE: Test-retest reliability and internal consistency of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children-Revised Version (DISC-R) were examined to evaluate the effects of a recent revision process. METHOD: A sample of outpatients 11 to 17 years old and their parents were administered the DISC-R in a test-retest design. RESULTS: For the parent interview, four diagnoses had sufficient cases to examine reliability; agreement was good to excellent for three of these. For the child interview, two of the four diagnoses with adequate cases showed good or excellent reliability. Using a combined parent-child algorithm, three of five diagnoses showed good or excellent reliability. Test-retest reliability for symptom scales was excellent for the parent DISC-R and good for the child version, except for oppositional defiant disorder. Maternal depressive symptoms did not affect reliability of reporting about the child's symptomatology. Internal consistency was satisfactory for symptom items comprising most diagnoses. CONCLUSIONS: Although some revision of the instrument will be necessary, the findings from this study suggest that the DISC-R is a promising research instrument for the diagnosis of psychopathology in older children and adolescents.

Adolescent↗

The Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children-Revised Version (DISC-R): III. Concurrent criterion validity.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the concurrent criterion validity of the Revised Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC-R), a structured lay-administered instrument designed for use in community studies, under conditions designed to provide strict controls for information and method variance. METHOD: The DISC-R was compared with a semistructured clinical interview that covered a similar information base as the DISC-R, used standardized ratings to record symptom information, and, similar to the DISC-R, was scored by DSM-III-R-based computerized diagnostic algorithms. Subjects were 74 child and adolescent clinic attendees and their adult custodians. RESULTS: Overall, moderate levels of agreement were found between DISC-R and clinician-generated diagnoses; these findings were tempered, however, by the fact that the validation interview was less reliable than the DISC-R. CONCLUSIONS: Although these findings provide preliminary support for the use of the DISC-R, they cast some doubt on the adequacy of clinician-generated diagnoses as validation criteria and suggest that alternate approaches to the assessment of validation should be pursued.

Adolescent↗

Psychopharmacologic treatment of child and adolescent obsessive compulsive disorder.

Recent evidence now suggests that OCD is much more common in young people than previously thought, affecting up to 200,000 children and adolescents in the United States alone. Unlike many childhood disorders, OCD appears remarkably similar for children and adults in terms of both clinical presentations and treatment response. The treatments of choice for OCD are antidepressants with potent serotonergic reuptake blocking effects such as fluoxetine and clomipramine. Both medications appear to be equally effective in terms of symptom remission, with different investigators reporting response rates in the range of 50% to 75%. Recent evidence suggests, however, that fluoxetine may be tolerated more easily than clomipramine and may be associated with less relapse upon discontinuation. Behavior therapy, either alone or in combination with medication, has been shown to be an effective alternative treatment. In spite of the increasing recognition of the disorder in both adults and children, only a handful of treatment outcome studies of child and adolescent OCD have been conducted and much work remains to be done in this area.

Adolescent↗