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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
- Authors:
- AYALON Liat, GOLDFRACHT Margalit, BECH Per
- Journal article citation:
- International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 25(5), May 2010, pp.497-502.
- Publisher:
- Wiley
The majority of older adults prefer to receive their mental health treatment in primary care. However, despite efforts to integrate depression treatment into primary care, depression often remains undetected. There is therefore a need to identify appropriate screening tools for depression. The goal of this study was to compare a single item screening for depression to 3 existing depression screening tools. The participants were a cross sectional sample of 153 older primary care patients in 2 clinics in Israel who completed the following depression-screening measures: a single depression screen, Patient Health Questionnaire-9, Major Depression Inventory, Visual Analogue Scale. The measures were evaluated against a depression diagnosis made by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV. The results showed that 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 the other screens. Nonetheless, its specificity of 83% suggested that it has to be followed up by a thorough diagnostic interview. Additional sensitivity analyses concerning the use of a single depression item taken directly from the depression screening measures supported this finding.