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Biomedical subjects

R Blashfield

Publications and source records attributed to R Blashfield.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1991

Correlates of Beck Depression Inventory scores in an ambulatory elderly population: symptoms, diseases, laboratory values, and medications.

BACKGROUND: Depression is one of the most important psychiatric disorders of older people. Between 1% and 5% of elderly persons who live in the community have major depression. Depressed elderly people are thought to be more likely to complain of symptoms such as headache, constipation, and pain than of disordered mood. The purpose of this study was to determine whether certain symptoms, diseases, or drugs used by older people correlate with scores on the Beck Depression Inventory. METHODS: Beck Depression Inventory scores were obtained in an ambulatory elderly population to identify correlates with self-reported signs, symptoms, diseases, drugs, and laboratory values. A total of 1048 participants were studied, including 712 women and 336 men. RESULTS: In this study, 13.7% of the men and 20.7% of the women had scores suggesting possible depression. A linear regression model revealed eight factors of significance in predicting scores on the Beck Depression Inventory. The most important predictors were the total number of symptoms reported by the patient (P less than .0001), and subjective complaints of memory loss (P less than .0003) and of pain in the abdomen (P less than .0004). CONCLUSIONS: Clinically, the results of this study suggest that depression is underdiagnosed in older patients and that multiple somatic symptoms are the best indicator of depression in this population.

Abdominal Pain↗
PubMed1986

Developmental classification of reading-disabled children.

The present study developed and used longitudinal cluster analysis, a multivariate classification technique, to classify a sample of 200 nonclinical normal and reading-disabled males based on their performances on a neuropsychological battery at kindergarten, second, and fifth grades. The resulting classification was examined against various internal and external validation criteria. Using a validation framework, five developmental subtypes of children, two normal and three deficit reader groups, were found. Three of these groups could best be described as partitions of a multivariate normal distribution; the other two, both containing deficit readers, showed different covariance structures, suggesting differing developmental patterns. These groups were shown to differ with respect to the domains of academic achievement, parental achievement, neurological status, birth histories, school behaviors, and neuropsychological-cognitive development. The results suggest that developmental classifications can be formed by using multivariate classification methods and the subtypes support findings from cross-sectional classification research on similar populations.

Child↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The effects of changing axis II diagnostic criteria.

This study examined whether changes in diagnostic criteria from the DSM-III to the DSM-III for personality disorders (PDs) had the intended effects. Seventy-two subjects at the University of Iowa from three research studies and one clinical sample were administered two structured interviews (the Structured Interview for DSM-III Personality [SIDP] and the revised SIDP [SIDP-R]) to assess DSM-III and DSM-III-R criteria. Major changes in rates of diagnoses were observed between the DSM-III and DSM-III-R criteria with kappas for agreement ranging between -.025 and .571. As expected, the switch from monothetic to polythetic definitions had an effect on which patients were assigned a given diagnosis. However, not all of the other revisions associated with the DSM-III-R had the intended effects. For instance, the frequency of the diagnosis of schizoid PD did not increase, nor did the overlap between borderline and histrionic PDs decrease. In addition, there was an unintended increase in the rate of paranoid PD. An analysis of individual criteria showed how small, apparently minor changes in the wording of criteria can sometimes have major effects on which patients received a diagnosis of PD.

Adult↗