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Background: Despite the huge youth population, there is a lack of psychiatric diagnostic instruments with reported psychometric properties in Chinese. This study reports the development of the Chinese version of DISC-IV and examines its test-retest reliability. Method: Seventy-eight parents and 79 youths (mean age 13.1 years) attending child psychiatric clinics were interviewed twice using the Chinese DISC-IV (Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children-IV) about 22 days apart. Results: The kappa coefficients were good to excellent for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) (both youth (Y) and parent (P) versions), major depressive disorder (MDD) (P), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (P); fair for anxiety disorder (P), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) (P, Y), MDD (Y); but poor for anxiety disorder (Y) and ADHD (Y). Parent informants had better test-retest reliability than youth informants. Conclusions: The Chinese DISC-IV had comparable test-retest reliability with the original English version.

The development of the Chinese version of Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children-Version 4 (DISC-IV) is reported and its test-retest reliability is examined. One of the findings suggests that parent informants had better test reliability than youth informants.

A representative sample of 855 Hong-Kong Chinese children aged 36–48 months were assessed using the BSQ and the PBCL. Good reliability for both instruments were found. For the BSQ and PBCL, 12.75% and 27.5% were above the cut-off points of 10+ and 12+ respectively and 5.9% were above both cut-off points. In the second stage, 234 subjects were recruited by stratified random sampling according to the results of the screening stage. A clinician interviewed the parent, child and teacher before making a diagnosis. The prevalence of behaviour disorder was: nil, 53.7%; dubious, 23.1%; mild, 18.0%; moderate, 4.5%; and severe, 0.7%. There were significantly more boys in the categories mild, moderate and severe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serotonin dysfunction has been implicated in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. Previous studies have shown an association between the T102C polymorphism of the 5HT2a receptor gene and schizophrenia. However, negative findings have also been reported. One possible explanation for such discrepancy is disease heterogeneity due to the current limitations in the diagnosis of schizophrenia. We conducted a case–control study of the T102C polymorphism with detailed characterisation of the clinical phenotypes to investigate the possible association with schizophrenia not only at the diagnostic level, but also with reference to other clinical phenotypes potentially related to serotonin dysfunction. Four hundred and seventy-one biologically unrelated schizophrenic patients and 523 unrelated healthy controls of Han Chinese descent in Hong Kong were compared for genotypes and allele frequencies of the T102C polymorphism by PCR amplification and restriction analysis. No evidence of association was detected at the diagnostic level and various clinical phenotypes. However, we found a trend association with small effect size between genotype 102T/102C and patients with better verbal fluency and less motor co-ordination soft neurological signs. There is a need for future large-scale studies on the possible associations between genetic polymorphisms and neurocognitive function impairments in schizophrenia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]