A Comparison of Two Diagnostic Methods

In the context of a seven-year follow-up study, 171 former psychiatric inpatients and 158 subjects from the general population were interviewed twice, first with the German version of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS) (version 2), and second with a clinical interview using the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Methodik und Dokumentation in der Psychiatrie (AMDP) checklist to assign a clinical International Classification of Diseases (eighth revision) (ICD-8) diagnosis, independent of the DIS. With the clinicians' ICD-8 diagnosis as a measure of the quality of the DIS, the results indicate a sufficiently high overall specificity and sensitivity of the DIS as a case-finding instrument in a general population survey, and a surprisingly high concordance of most DIS diagnostic classes with comparable ICD diagnoses. Only for panic disorders (possibly due to different symptom and time criteria) and schizophrenia (possibly due to the strict probe system, the dependence on self-reports, and time criteria) was low sensitivity found. Because there is no DIS diagnostic category comparable with ICD-8 unipolar affective psychosis, a meaningful comparison of this ICD category with Research Diagnostic Criteria and DSM-III was not possible.