Depression vulnerability within smoking research: How accurate are one-item screening items?

Area of Science:

• Psychiatry
• Behavioral Science
• Addiction Medicine

Background:

• Smoking cessation studies often use brief screening items to assess current depressive symptoms.
• The validity of these items for detecting underlying depression vulnerability, beyond current symptoms, is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the concurrent validity of two one-item screening questions for diagnosing past major depression.
• To determine if these items can serve as proxies for depressive vulnerability in smoking research.

Main Methods:

• Seventy-seven nicotine-dependent participants completed telephone screening questions.
• Participants then underwent comprehensive laboratory assessments for depressive vulnerability, including clinician-diagnosed history of major depressive disorder.

Main Results:

• The one-item screening questions accurately identified a history of major depression.
• These items also predicted the number of recurrent depressive episodes, rumination, and depression proneness (p<0.05).

Conclusions:

• One-item screening questions are useful proxies for depressive vulnerability in smoking treatment studies.
• These validated tools can be employed in studies lacking comprehensive assessment procedures.