The Rosetta project

There is growing evidence that negative symptoms can be divided into the motivational (apathy/experiencial) side and the emotional expressive side (expressive). We and few other have shown that the best scale to date, the BNSS, have these two underlying dimensions (there other models to explain the scale structure, but this is not the point here). In a nutshell, having just one score for negative symptoms, does not capture well the full picture, such as the PANSS scale (the gold standard) does. The problem is that most/all clinical trials use PANSS to determine efficacy over negative symptoms.

Of course, we can design future studies to take into account both dimensions, but shall we just ignore the the information in the previous studies? In this work, led by Wolpe and using a multicultural large database, including longitudinal data, we aimed to explore if the PANSS can be ‘translated’ (hence the Rosetta name) into the two BNSS dimensions. We tortured the data as much as possible, but the short answer is no. Perhaps with the expressive (blunted affect and logia), but not with the motivation (experience) dimension.

Unfortunately, we can not a very good use of previous data.

Read here