INTRODUCTION A significant number of mania patients fail to respond to current pharmacotherapy, thereby there is need for novel augmentation strategies. The results of some early studies showed the effectiveness of cholinomimetics in the treatment of mania. One open case series suggested the efficacy of donepezil in the treatment of bipolar disorder. Our aim was to explore whether an oral choli...

The term ‘treatment-resistant schizophrenia’ is broadly used to describe people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia who do not respond adequately to antipsychotic treatment and continue to have residual symptoms and/or poor psychosocial functioning. Although treatment-resistant schizophrenia is a familiar concept, various definitions and criteria have been proposed over the years to define it as ...

Factor analytic work on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) has yielded varied and conflicting results. The current study explored potential causes of these discrepancies. Prior research has been limited by small sample sizes and an incorrect assumption that the items are normally distributed when in practice responses are highly skewed ord...

OBJECTIVES The pharmacotherapy of Parkinson's disease (PD) is often challenging as clinicians have to find a favourable balance between the efficacy on motor symptoms and side effect profiles of different dopaminergic medications. We aimed to assess the available evidence on the role of dopamine agonist monotherapy as an alternative to Levodopa in the treatment of motor symptoms of PD, along wi...

Background: About one third of patients with schizophrenia are treatment-resistant. The treatment options for these patients are limited. Objectives: To study the short-term efficacy of electroconvulsive therapy in treatment-resistant schizophrenia. Methods: 30 patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia were included. Patients were assessed at baseline, after 4, and after 6 sessions of ele...

Background: Therapeutic options for patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia are limited. In such cases, a combination of atypical antipsychotic drugs is an often used strategy. We tested the hypothesis that the combination of amisulpride and clozapine would lead to long-term improvement in this patient group. Objective: 15 patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia participated in ...

The use of rating scales in psychiatry increased in the late 1950s with the introduction of antipsychotics and antidepressants. Initially rating scales were used mainly to evaluate the effectiveness of new medication against placebo. As the need increased for good reliability and validity, further rating scales were developed and these were used not only in clinical trials but also to diagnose ...

BACKGROUND The influence of ethnicity on different aspects of psychiatric hospitalization is far from clear. THE AIM OF THE STUDY The main aim of the study was to compare the Arab and the Jewish inpatients, at the time of admission, for the demographic factors, severity of psychotic, and affective psychopathology and comorbid drug abuse rate. POPULATION, METHOD, AND TOOLS: Among 250 consecuti...

Although major depressive disorder (MDD) has a variety of symptoms beyond the affective dimensions, the factor structure and contents of comprehensive psychiatric symptoms of this disorder have rarely been explored using the 18-item Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). We aimed to identify the factor structure of the 18-item BPRS in Korean MDD patients. A total of 258 MDD patients were recrui...

Diagnostic and Symptom Quantification Procedures Masters or Doctoral-level clinicians conducted diagnostic evaluations and clinical ratings. Diagnoses were confirmed by consensus conference. Among a random sample of 10 subjects, the level of inter-rater agreement for diagnosis was high, with kappa = 0.86. Symptoms were quantified with the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), Scale for the Ass...