[Clinician' emotional resonance as investigation tool: development and preliminary validation of a questionnaire]. / Il sentire del clinico come strumento di conoscenza: sviluppo e validazione preliminare di una scala di valutazione.

AIMS: A robust psychopathological and psychotherapeutic tradition underscores the importance of the clinician's feelings in the assessment and therapeutic process. Our aim is to develop an instrument to evaluate psychiatrist' experience induced by each patient. This paper describes the development and preliminary validation of this instrument. METHODS: Based on the relevant literature and our clinical experience, we developed a self-completed questionnaire consisting of 65 items covering various aspects of the clinician' emotional resonance. Ten psychiatrists completed our questionnaire immediately after first clinical interviews involving a total of 125 patients with various psychiatric diagnoses. Also, they completed the Profile of Mood State (POMS) immediately before and after these interviews. The factor structure and convergent validity of the questionnaire was examined. RESULTS: We identified a six-factor structure. The factors showed acceptable internal consistency and were interpretable as different aspects of the clinician-patient interaction as experienced by the clinician. There was a consistent pattern of correlations between factor scores and changes in POMS scale scores during the clinical interviews. DISCUSSION: The study results, though preliminary, suggest that clinicians' subjective reactions during their interactions with patients can be validly and reliably measured. Quantitative measurement of clinician's subjectivity is potentially useful in both clinical and research settings.

[Long-term course of treatment strategies in panic disorder: an update narrative review 1999-2010]. / Esiti a lungo termine del trattamento del disturbo da attacco di panico: una rassegna narrativa di aggiornamento 1999-2010.

Panic disorder (PD) represents an insidious, often chronic, recurrent and relapsing illness. Although studying PD is a topical subject because it affects both treatment costs and patients' quality of life, the literature demonstrates that long-term studies are rare and not very systematic. Even if many short-term studies (within 6 months) show that the present treatment strategies have very good results, the outcome data in the long- term suggest that a significant rate of patients with PD, in remission at the end of a treatment, relapses during the follow-up, so that there is the need to find treatment strategies to maintain the remission achieved in the short-term as long as possible. This study offers an overview of 35 studies on the long-term outcomes of PD, reviewing the recent follow-up studies with at least 6 months of follow-up and that investigate the role of comorbidity in the follow-up of PD, the outcome predictors and the present treatment strategies.