A Follow-Up and Family Study of Briquet's Syndrome

Abstract

For many years we and other colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri have been concerned with the need to develop widely accepted, valid diagnostic criteria for psychiatric disorders. The aim has been to identify patient groups as homogeneous as possible. Diagnostic criteria, such as those used in this study, were therefore developed with the goal of maximising specificity (i.e. reducing false positives) while keeping sensitivity as high as possible (i.e. keeping false negatives low).