Medical doctor and Associate Professor Søren Dinesen Østergaard from Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital has just received a grant of DKK 2.6 million from the Independent Research Fund Denmark to test a new method for measuring the severity of schizophrenia.

2018.01.04 | Helle Horskjær Hansen

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, but it is also an illness that can be treated. In this context, it is important to be able to monitor the severity of the illness to ensure that the treatment has the desired effect.

Researchers from Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital have developed a new method to measure the severity of schizophrenia. However, they still need to clinically test the method before it can be taken into use in practice. The grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark goes to the project "Validation of PANSS-6: A Brief Rating Scale Measuring the Severity of Schizophrenia."

When the severity of a mental illness needs to be measured, a 'rating scale' is used. Here the severity of the symptoms of the disease are assessed on the basis of observations and interviews with the patient. Each symptom is assigned a score on a fixed scale. The combined score is thus an expression of the actual severity of the disease. In the case of schizophrenia, the most commonly used rating scale is the "Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale" (PANSS). 

PANSS covers 30 symptoms and it takes approximately one hour to carry out a measurement using this scale. In a busy work day at a hospital, it is not possible to spend so much time on measuring the level of severity for each individual patient – and therefore it is often not done at all.

Søren Dinesen Østergaard has, together with his colleagues, shown that it is likely possible to make do with assessing six out of the 30 PANSS symptoms without losing important information about severity. This "PANSS-6' rating only takes about 15 minutes to complete.

Contact

MD, PhD, Associate Professor Søren Dinesen Østergaard
Jens Christian Skou Junior Fellow, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies
Aarhus University, Department of Clinical Medicine 
Aarhus University Hospital, Research Unit for Psychoses
Mobile: (+45) 6128 2753
sdo@clin.au.dk