The proposed research will involve development and evaluation of psychometric rating scales and other instruments for data acquisition in clinical psychopharmacology research. Efforts will focus on, but not be restricted to, development of an instrument for characterizing and assessing acute anxiety and panic attacks in children, a scale for measuring the severity of dementia in elderly patients, and a multiphasic test battery for repeated assessment of treatment effects in patients with primary degenerative dementia. Actual participation in clinical psychopharmacology research is essential to accomplish those psychometric goals. Personnel will interview and/or test subjects in a double-blind, multiple crossover design study of the efficacy of oral physostigmine in senile dementia and a study alprazolam in blocking or ameliorating acute anxiety and panic attacks in children. Statistical issues which have become obvious in the drug industry or at FDA will be pursued by analytic and simulation methods. These include, but will not be restricted to, methodology for combining results from multiple independent drug trials, methodology for confirming the presence of a true treatment effect in some studies even though it may not be present in all of them, methodology for interim analysis of data from protracted clinical trails, and methodology for powerful analysis of non-Gaussian frequency count data.
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