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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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'Do you think you suffer from depression?'
— Reevaluating the use of a single item question for the screening of depression in older primary care patients | | Author(s) | Liat Ayalon, Margalit Goldfracht, Per Bech |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 25, no 5, May 2010 |
| Pages | pp 497-502 |
| Source | http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/gps DOI: 10.1002/gps.2368 |
| Keywords | Depression ; Screening ; General practice ; Diagnosis ; Evaluation ; Finland. |
| Annotation | The majority of older adults seek depression treatment in primary care. Despite impressive efforts to integrate depression treatment into primary care, depression often remains undetected. This Finnish study compared a single item screening for depression with existing depression screening tools. Participants comprised a cross-sectional sample of 153 older primary care patients. They completed several depression-screening measures (e.g. a single depression screen, Patient Health Questionnaire-9, Major Depression Inventory, and Visual Analogue Scale). Measures were evaluated against a depression diagnosis made by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV. Overall, 3.9% of the sample was diagnosed with depression. The most notable finding was that the single-item question, 'do you think you suffer from depression?' had as good or better sensitivity (83%) than all other screens. Nonetheless, its specificity of 83% suggested that it has to be followed up by a through diagnostic interview. Additional sensitivity analyses concerning the use of a single depression item taken directly from the depression screening measures supported this finding. An easy way to detect depression in older primary care patients would be asking the single question, 'do you think you suffer from depression?' (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-100827225 A |
| Classmark | ENR: 3V: L5: LK7: 4C: 76L |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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