The research community has a growing interest in understanding how people with schizophrenia perceive their own symptoms, medical care, and the treatments they receive. This information can be invaluable to mental health professionals in improving the clinical effectiveness of interventions and the quality of care.

The Mental Health and Addictions research group of IDIBGI, composed of professionals from the Mental Health and Addictions Network of the Institute of Health Care (IAS), has participated with their expertise knowledge in the creation of a tool to give a voice to people diagnosed with schizophrenia and to collect their perceptions in relation to their pathology.

This is the PRISS scale (Patient-Reported Impact of Symptoms in Schizophrenia Scale), a questionnaire resulting from research in the field that professionals can use with their patients in the consultation room, and that the diagnosed persons themselves can also answer directly through the web page.

This tool is based on the PRO (Patient Reported Outcomes) concept to measure the self-reported experiences of people with schizophrenia, that is, the person's analysis of his or her own behavior. The questionnaire addresses a series of items grouped into three main blocks: productive subjective experiences, affective-negative subjective experiences and arousal.

The creation of this tool is based on research published in the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, which evaluated the psychometric properties of the PRISS scale. In a study conducted with 162 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in Spain, the presence, frequency, concern, and interference of symptoms reported by patients in their daily lives were measured. The study's results show that the PRISS is a reliable and valid scale for measuring these subjective experiences.

Among the most relevant findings, the structural validity analysis revealed a three-factor structure (productive subjective experiences, affective-negative subjective experiences, and excitation), which explained 56.11% of the variance. Additionally, the study found that 72.2% of the correlations between the PRISS and other scales used in clinical evaluation, such as the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS), were statistically significant. These results suggest that the PRISS provides a complementary and valuable perspective to traditional clinical evaluations.

The PRISS scale has been created jointly with the University of Malaga, the Andalusian Regional Government, the University of Cadiz, the Sant Joan de Déu Health Park and the Biomedical Research Institute of Malaga.

Reference article: Moreno-Küstner B, Fábrega-Ruz J, Gonzalez-Caballero JL, Reyes-Martin S, Ochoa S, Romero-Lopez-Alberca C, Cid J, Vila-Badia R, Frigola-Capell E, Salvador-Carulla L. Patient-reported impact of symptoms in schizophrenia scale (PRISS): Development and validation. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2022 Jun;145(6):640-655. doi: 10.1111/acps.13417. Epub 2022 Mar 2. PMID: 35188673.