ArticleComprehensive psychiatry2017
What do clinicians treat: Diagnoses or symptoms? The incremental validity of a symptom-based, dimensional characterization of emotional disorders in predicting medication prescription patterns.
Article in Comprehensive psychiatry, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed, 102 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Influences on prescribing in borderline personality disorder: insights from health care professionals: a qualitative interview study.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- A multimodal Bayesian network for symptom-level depression and anxiety prediction from voice and speech data.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Network and Factor Structure of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms in Telemental Healthcare Patients From Bangladesh: Evidence for Precision Mental Healthcare.Depression and anxiety · 2026Observational
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- The association between the use of video games, social media and online dating sites, and the symptoms of anxiety and/or depression in adults aged 25 and over.Global mental health (Cambridge, England) · 2024Article
- Bifactor analysis of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) in individuals with traumatic brain injury.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- New approaches to deep phenotyping in addictions.Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors · 2023Review
- The structure of mood and anxiety disorder symptoms in the perinatal period.Journal of affective disorders · 2023Article
- Editorial: Community series in novel antipsychotics within and beyond clinical trials: symptom-based treatment of psychiatric disorders with D3-D2 partial agonists, volume II.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Inferring Trajectories of Psychotic Disorders Using Dynamic Causal Modeling.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Can digital health researchers make a difference during the pandemic? Results of the single-arm, chatbot-led Elena+: Care for COVID-19 interventional study.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 6 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundAlthough practice guidelines are based on disorders specified in diagnostic manuals, such as the DSM, practitioners appear to follow symptoms when making treatment decisions. Psychiatric medication is generally prescribed in a transdiagnostic manner, further highlighting how symptoms, not diagnoses, often guide clinical practice. A quantitative approach to nosology promises to provide better guidance as it describes psychopathology dimensionally and its organization reflects patterns of covariation among symptoms.
aimTo investigate whether a quantitative classification of emotional disorders can account for naturalistic medication prescription patterns better than traditional diagnoses.
methodsSymptom dimensions and DSM diagnoses of emotional disorders, as well as prescribed medications, were assessed using interviews in a psychiatric outpatient sample (N=318, mean age 42.5years old, 59% female, 81% Caucasian).
resultsEach diagnosis was associated with prescription of multiple medication classes, and most medications were associated with multiple disorders. This was largely due to heterogeneity of clinical diagnoses, with narrow, homogenous dimensions underpinning diagnoses showing different medication profiles. Symptom dimensions predicted medication prescription better than DSM diagnoses, irrespective of whether this was examined broadly across all conditions, or focused on a specific disorder and medication indicated for it.
conclusionsPsychiatric medication was prescribed in line with symptoms rather than DSM diagnoses. A quantitative approach to nosology may better reflect treatment planning and be a more effective guide to pharmacotherapy than traditional diagnoses. This adds to a diverse body of evidence about superiority of the quantitative system in practical applications and highlights its potential to improve psychiatric care.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.