A New Rating Scale for Evaluating Clinical Response in Psychoneurotic Outpatients

¹ Research and Development Division, Smith Kline & French Laboratories, Philadelphia, Penn.

A new symptom rating scale, called the Physician's Rating List (PRL), designed to assess anxiety and total morbidity in psychoneurotics, was compared to global assessments in outpatients with anxiety reactions who were treated with trifluoperazine or a combination of trifluoperazine and amobarbital. Behavioral studies in animals had shown that the combined treatment had a wider range of activity than trifluoperazine alone. Whether the new rating scale and global ratings could distinguish this difference clinically led to this double-blind study by 17 physicians in more than 350 patients.

The results of this study showed that the new rating scale is more sensitive than the frequently used global ratings in measuring clinical response in psychoneurotic outpatients. It was sensitive enough to determine clinically the differences between trifluoperazine and a trifluoperazine-amobarbital combination and to show that the combination provided a significantly greater reduction of anxiety and total morbidity than trifluoperazine alone. With global ratings, differences between the two regimens were not statistically significant.

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