Psychotic Symptom Rating Scales In Schizophrenia:Reliability And Validity Retests And Application

Background:Clinical manifestations of schizophrenia are various, hallucinations and delusions are the most common positive psychotic symptoms of schizophrenic patients, and auditory hallucination is one of the most common hallucinations, so multi-dimensional identification and evaluation of auditory hallucination and delusion is very important. When the Psychotic Symptom Rating Scale (PSYRATS) was revised, most of subjects were mental health disorder with psychotic symptoms in which the patients with schizoaffective psychosis with strong emotional may affect theirs cognition for psychotic symptoms, as many items of PSYRATS were assessed the cognitive status of emotional symptoms to psychiatric symptoms, therefore it is necessary to revise this scale for the schizophrenic patients as the main subjects. The Chinese version of PSYRATS can assess the hallucinations and delusions at multi dimension, however which most been used in cognitive psychotherapy, and there was no study in the field of drug treatment of schizophrenia. So the application and related applications advantages of the PSYRATS in drug treatment of schizophrenia has an important meaning.Aim:The aim of this study was to investigate the reliability and validity of PS YRATS in the schizophrenic patients with hallucinations and delusions. The study also aims to explore the application and application advantages of PS YRATS in the evaluation of drug efficacy to schizophrenic patients.Method:All the 150 schizophrenic patients according to International Classification of Diseases 10th Edition (ICD-10) finished the PSYRATS and Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Factor analysis and Reliability analysis were used to analyze the PSYRATS cores. The PANSS score was chosen to assess validity of the PSYRATS.60 in 150 subjects received the drug treatment and used the PSYRATS score and PANSS score to evaluate the drug efficacy.Results:The PSYRATS had good inter-rater (Cronbach’s α=O.866)and retest reliability(r=0.927). The factor load of every item for factors is from 0.493 to 0.924. The exploratory factor analysis showed that there were two and three factors in the subscale of the delusion and hallucination respectively. The hallucination of PSYRATS was significantly correlated with the hallucination item score (0.656) and positive score (0.458) of PANSS. The delusion of PSYRATS was correlated to delusion item (0.811) and the positive score (0.794) of PANSS. The total score of PSYRATS was correlated to delusion factor (0.516), hallucination factor (0.580) and positive subscale of PANSS (0.591). In the randomized controlled drug treatment group, after treatment, the score of PANSS, the subscale of the positive and negative and general pathological symptoms, PSYRATS and its all subscales decreased significantly compare to baseline. The study found that the loudness and location and beliefs reorigin of voices and Disruption in Auditory hallucinations scale and Delusional conviction will reduce significantly over one week of antipsychotic treatment.Conclusion:The Chinese version of the PSYRATS had a good reliability and validity in the schizophrenic patients with hallucination and delusion, and can assess the severity of those symptoms effectively and multi-dimensionally. So it may be a useful evaluation tool in the field of academic research and clinical practice.