ECDEU assessment manual for psychopharmacology

This revision of the 1970 ECDEU Assessment Manual represents the cooperative effort of many individuals whose comments and criticisms have served to sustain the ECDEU program as an evolving entity. The adult elements of the ECDEU Assess- ment Battery have been modified and expanded over the period of the last decadeas a consequence of the interactions among those investigators employing the Battery in clinical drug trials, the pharmaceutical industry, the Psychopharmacol ogy Research Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health and the Biometric Laboratory of The George Washington University. The size of this group makes it difficult to acknowledge every individual by name as I would wish, and, therefore, appreciation for their contributions is extended collectively but no less warmly.The newer pediatric section of the ECDEU Assessment Battery is the culmina- tion of several years of effort on the part of the Pediatric Psychopharmacology Conference which was organized under the auspices of the Psychopharmacol ogy Research Branch. The contributions of this Conference have been summarized in a 1973 SpecialIssue of the Psychopharmacology Bulletin, entitled "Pharmacotherapy of Children" and are happily acknowledged here.A number of individuals have been kind enough to provide special commentariesfor sections of the Manual, A list of these contributing authors is given below.To them, and to the developers of all the assessment instruments cited in this Manual, deep appreciation is expressed.The emergence of the present Assessment Battery has been accompanied by the development of a data processing system called the Biometric Laboratory Information Processing System (BLIPS). To the entire staff of the Biometric Laboratory - and particularly to those cited below - I want to extend special thanks for the ingenu-ity and patience they have shown during the several years of almost continuous de- signing and redesigning of BLIPS.W.G. Read more