Utility and limitations of PHQ-9 in a clinic specializing in psychiatric care

BMC Psychiatry

Research Article

Teruaki Tanaka¹  Shin Nakagawa¹  Shuken Boku¹  Takeshi Inoue¹  Tsukasa Koyama¹  Tsugiko Kurita¹  Rie Kameyama¹  Hiroyuki Toda¹  Yasuya Nakato¹ 

[1] Department of Psychiatry, Hokkaido University Graduate School of Medicine, North 15, West 7, Kita-ku, 060-8638, Sapporo, Japan;

关键词: Bipolar Disorder;    Major Depressive Disorder;    Summary Score;    Receiver Operating Characteristic;    Social Anxiety Disorder;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-244X-12-73

 received in 2011-11-06, accepted in 2012-07-03,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), despite its excellent reliability and validity in primary care, has not been examined for administration to psychiatric patients. This study assesses the accuracy of PHQ-9 in screening for major depressive episode and in diagnosing major depressive episode in patients of a psychiatric specialty clinic.MethodsWe compared operational characteristics of PHQ-9 as a screening and diagnostic instrument to DSM-IV-TR diagnosis by a trained psychiatrist as a reference standard. The reference criteria were “current major depressive episode” or “current major depressive episode with major depressive disorder”. PHQ-9 was used with two thresholds: diagnostic algorithm and summary scores (PHQ-9 ≥ 10). The optimal cut-off points of PHQ-9 summary scores were analyzed using a receiver operational characteristics (ROC) curve.ResultsFor “current major depressive episode”, PHQ-9 showed high sensitivity and high negative predictive value at both thresholds, but its specificity and positive predictive value were low. For “current major depressive episode with major depressive disorder”, PHQ-9 also showed high sensitivity and high negative predictive value at both thresholds, but the positive predictive value decreased more than that for “current major depressive episode”. The ROC analysis showed the optimal cut-off score of 13/14 for “current major depressive episode”.ConclusionsPHQ-9 is useful for screening, but not for diagnosis of “current major depressive episode” in a psychiatric specialty clinic.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Inoue et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012