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Further development of the 12-item EDE-QS: identifying a cut-off for screening purposes
Katarina Prnjak1, Deborah Mitchison2,3, Scott Griffiths4
1School of Medicine, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia. katarinaprnjak@gmail.com.
Background:
The Eating Disorder Examination - Questionnaire Short (EDE-QS) was developed as a 12-item version of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q) with a 4-point response scale that assesses eating disorder (ED) symptoms over the preceding 7 days. It has demonstrated good psychometric properties at initial testing. The purpose of this brief report is to determine a threshold score that could be used in screening for probable ED cases in community settings.
Methods:
Data collected from Gideon et al. (2016) were re-analyzed. In their study, 559 participants (80.86% female; 9.66% self-reported ED diagnosis) completed the EDE-Q, EDE-QS, SCOFF, and Clinical Impairment Assessment (CIA). Discriminatory power was compared between ED instruments using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses.
Results:
A score of 15 emerged as the threshold that ensured the best trade-off between sensitivity (.83) and specificity (.85), and good positive predictive value (.37) for the EDE-QS, with discriminatory power comparable to other ED instruments.
Conclusion:
The EDE-QS appears to be an instrument with good discriminatory power that could be used for ED screening purposes.
