A group of Italian and American investigators has published a new instrument for assessing cognitive and physical functioning (the Massachusetts General Hospital Cognitive and Physical Functioning Questionnaire, CPFQ), in the current issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. It is a brief scale to measure cognitive and executive dysfunction in mood and anxiety disorders.

The internal consistency of the CPFQ was assessed by computing Cronbach's coefficient based upon the average intercorrelation of the 7 items of the CPFQ in a sample of depressed outpatients and by factor analyzing data from the same sample to confirm that the scale is unifactorial and measuring a single construct screening scores and pretreatment baseline scores…