This study assesses the sensitivity of full and brief forms of a parentrated
mania scale to variations in diagnoses. Parents of a sample of
150 subjects either diagnosed with bipolar disorder (BD) or attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or healthy controls (HC),
completed the full Child Mania Rating Scale and other measures.
We used single-parameter item-response theory models to produce a
brief parent mania rating scale from the full version. The 10-item, brief
Child Mania Rating Scale—Parent (CMRS-P) version correlated .93
with 11 items from the full CMRS-P that were not used in
constructing the brief version, and showed accuracy comparable to
the full scale in differentiating BD from ADHD, and in discriminating
among bipolar subtypes.