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This condition is difficult to diagnose, however, because doing so prospectively requires the evaluation of daily symptom ratings and their fluctuations over a two-month period. As such, many clinicians make decisions through a retrospective analysis of a patient’s symptoms, which is known to be prone to false positives, according to the authors.
A study published in AJP in Advance has proposed a new approach termed the Carolina Premenstrual Assessment Scoring System (C-PASS). Through this computerized procedure, clinicians can enter patient-provided ratings on a spreadsheet that determines a PMDD diagnosis based on a standardized thresholds.
The study authors compared the C-PASS diagnoses of 200 women who had submitted their symptom ratings each week with those of an expert clinician who also reviewed prospectively and found a 94.5% agreement between the two (11 disagreements).
“The current C-PASS materials may be immediately useful clinically,” the study authors concluded. “However, additional development is needed to digitize data collection and streamline the diagnostic process for clinical application.”
(istock/KatarzynaBialasiewicz)