Abstract
Objective: The Clinical Global Impression-Severity (CGI), a global psychiatric assessment scale with only one rating item, has been recommended by our Central Health Insurance Bureau for evaluating mentally-ill patients in clinical settings. This study, utilizing rigorous statistics in a large psychiatric population, investigated the correlation of scores of the CGI and the Positive and utilizing rigorous statistics in a large psychiatric population, investigated the correlation of scores of the CGI and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), a comprehensive psychiatric rating scale with 30 items and adequate reliability. Patients and Methods: One hundred and twenty one newly hospitalized schizophrenia patients with acute exacerbation entered this prospective 6-week repeated measures study. Clinical assessments were conducted biweekly with the CGI and PANSS. The logarithms of PANSS total scores were selected to serve as the outcome values because they were normally distributed and thus suitable for regression analyses. To determine the effects of CGI scores on outcome values, generalized estimating equation methods were utilized to adjust the effects of other possible prognostic factors and take into account the within-subject dependence over repeated assessments. Results: Both CGI and PANSS scores declined gradually during the study period. After adjusting the effects of the study duration and other variables, each score increase in the CGI raised the total PANSS score by 16.5% on average (ρ＜0.0001). In addition, every 1-week increment in poior hospitalization duration also increased the total PANSS score by 0.02% (ρ＜0.0001). Other possible prognostic factors did not significantly influence the outcome value. Conclusion: The results suggest that CGI scores are significantly realated to PANSS total scores in acutely ill schizophrenia inpatients. To our knowledge, this is the first study revealing this correlation and it has important clinical implications. Further studies are warranted, particularly for other populations such as chronically ill patients or outpatients.
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