Citation

Vasiliadis HM, Chudzinski V, Gontijo-Guerra S, Préville M. Psychiatry Res. 2015; 228(1): 89-94.

Affiliation

University of Sherbrooke, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Longueuil, Quebec, Canada; Charles Le Moyne Hospital Research Center, Longueuil, Quebec, Canada.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.psychres.2015.04.019

PMID

25956759

Abstract

Screening tools that appropriately detect older adults׳ mental disorders are of great public health importance. The present study aimed to establish cutoff scores for the 10-item Kessler Psychological Distress (K10) and the 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) scales when screening for depression and anxiety. We used data from participants (n=1811) in the Enquête sur la Santé des Aînés-Service study. Depression and anxiety were measured using DSM-V and DSM-IV criteria. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis provided an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.767 and 0.833 for minor and for major depression when using K10. A cutoff of 19 was found to balance sensitivity (0.794) and specificity (0.664) for minor depression, whereas a cutoff of 23 was found to balance sensitivity (0.692) and specificity (0.811) for major depression. When screening for an anxiety with GAD-7, ROC analysis yielded an AUC of 0.695; a cutoff of 5 was found to balance sensitivity (0.709) and specificity (0.568). No significant differences were found between subgroups of age and gender. Both K10 and GAD-7 were able to discriminate between cases and non-cases when screening for depression and anxiety in an older adult population of primary care service users.

Language: en