Development and Validation of a Screening Tool for Generalized Anxiety and Major Depressive Disorder in Patients with...

Anxiety and depression are often underdiagnosed in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This study aimed to develop and validate a screening tool for anxiety and depression in COPD patients.

Stable COPD patients were consecutively recruited from November 2021 to October 2023 and underwent a psychiatric interview to diagnose generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and/or major depressive disorder (MDD) based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Patients were split into training and validation sets according to their recruitment time. We assessed known risk factors and used core items from the Patient Health Questionnaire Anxiety and Depression Scale (PHQ-ADS) to develop a prediction nomogram. Multivariable logistic regression with least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) were used to construct the nomogram.

Among the enrolled COPD patients (n = 329), 58 (25.6%) in the training cohort and 33 (32.4%) in the validation cohort were diagnosed with GAD and/or MDD. Three variables were identified in the prediction nomogram: COPD Assessment Test score and two core items from PHQ-ADS. The under the curve (AUC) value for the nomogram was 0.826 (95% CI: 0.755-0.897) and 0.855 (95% CI: 0.767-0.942) in the training and validation cohorts, respectively. The calibration curve was close to the diagonal. The discriminatory power of the screening nomogram was comparable to that of PHQ-ADS (AUC: 0.826 vs. 0.831, P = 0.832).

The new screening tool for GAD and MDD in COPD patients is concise and valid, with discriminatory power comparable to existing anxiety/depression screening questionnaires.