Beyond Anxiety and Depression: Multidimensional Psychiatric Screening for Neurological Patients Based on HADS and...

Although neurological patients are known to suffer from psychiatric comorbidities, appropriate, cost-effective, standardized screening measures are still scarce in clinical practice. We examined a multidimensional psychiatric screening for neurological patients.

We report a retrospective analysis of multidimensional psychiatric screening using the HADS-D and the BSI-53 in 437 consecutive neurological inpatients. The HADS-D describes depressive and anxiety symptoms, while the BSI-53 expands the symptom clusters associated with psychiatric disorders by somatization, obsessive-compulsion, interpersonal sensitivity, hostility, paranoid ideation, psychoticism and global measures of mental distress. Patients were separated in diagnostic groups (vascular, demyelinating, degenerative, epileptic, other) with regard to their diagnosis.

Our results corroborate previous findings of high prevalence of psychiatric symptoms particularly in younger patients (< 60 years). Furthermore, 27.2% were above the HADS-D cut-off for anxiety and 25.4% for depression. We found no differences between diagnostic groups. Importantly, we also show that neurological patients suffer from mental distress beyond anxiety and depression, around 16-30% depending on age and gender.

We have shown that a notable proportion of neurological patients report psychiatric symptoms, thus emphasizing the importance of a thorough, multidimensional psychiatric screening in neurological patients.

DRKS00030528, date of registration: 2022-11-04 retrospectively registered.