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Screening for anxiety disorders. Sensitivity and specificity of the Anxiety Screening Questionnaire (ASQ-15)
1Clinical Psychology and Epidemiology, Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, München, Germany.
Background:
The paper describes the rationale, sensitivity and specificity of the Anxiety Screening Questionnaire (ASQ), a disorder-specific screening instrument for use in primary care.
Method:
Two hundred and fifty subjects sampled from psychiatric, primary care settings and the community, participated in a test-retest reliability as well as a procedural validity study, using the M-CIDI with DSM-IV algorithms as a diagnostic yardstick.
Results:
The ASQ was found to be easy to administer and acceptable and efficient in terms of sensitivity and specificity for generalised anxiety syndromes. The test-retest item reliability was good to excellent with kappa values of 0.6 or above. As compared with the validity standard, the DSM-IV/CIDI diagnoses caseness sensitivity was generally high (above 82%) for all diagnostic domains covered, whereas the specificity was only high for DSM-IV threshold and subthreshold generalised anxiety disorder.
Conclusions:
These preliminary findings demonstrate the usefulness of this anxiety screening questionnaire, constructed closely following the guidelines of specific diagnostic criteria.