BMJ  2003;327 (15 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7424.0-g

Editor's choice

Dawn of the diagnostic age

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Have you often been bothered by feeling down, depressed, or hopeless? Have you often had little interest or pleasure in doing things? We might ask our patients—or even ourselves—these two questions, but how useful might they be in diagnosing depression? Doctors have been asking these and other questions for many years; even the shortest screening questionnaires generally run to at least seven questions and take several minutes in a consultation. Bruce Arroll and colleagues hypothesised that asking these two questions during a consultation would offer a quick and reliable screen for depression in primary care (p 1144). When both answers were no, people were unlikely to be depressed (high number of true negatives, low false negatives). But the method produced many false positives, requiring further questioning from the clinician to confirm the diagnosis. A weakness of the study is the lack of a non-screened comparison group, but the . . . [Full text of this article]

(kabbasi@bmj.com)

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