Anxiety Disorders in Primary Care: Prevalence, Impairment, Comorbidity, and Detection

Context Anxiety and depression are both common in primary care patients, but much less attention has been paid to anxiety. Contribution The authors administered a 7-item anxiety scale (Generalized Anxiety Disorder [GAD]-7) to 965 primary care patients, who also had a structured interview, to detect an anxiety disorder. Of these patients, 19.5% had at least 1 anxiety disorder. Patients with anxiety had worse functional status, more disability days, and more physician visits, but 41% were not being treated for any anxiety disorder. The GAD-7 had high sensitivity and good specificity for detecting a generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Implications Anxiety disorders are common, underrecognized, and undertreated, but they are easy to detect with a brief questionnaire. The Editors Anxiety and depression are the 2 most common mental health problems seen in the general medical setting (15). Although increasing attention has been paid to anxiety, it still lags far behind depression in terms of research as well as clinical and public health efforts in screening, diagnosis, and treating affected individuals. This is unfortunate given the prevalence of anxiety and its substantial impact on patient functioning, work productivity, and health care costs (614). More than 30 million Americans have a lifetime history of anxiety (15), and anxiety disorders cost an estimated $42 billion dollars per year in the United States alone, counting direct and indirect costs (16). The 4 most common anxiety disorders (excluding simple phobias that seldom present clinically) are generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (1723). However, despite the substantial disability associated with each anxiety disorder and the availability of effective treatments, only a minority of patients (15% to 36%) with anxiety are recognized in primary care (24, 25). In our paper, we analyze results from a large primary carebased anxiety study (26) to answer several questions. First, what is the prevalence of these 4 anxiety disorders, both individually and concurrent with one another? Second, how do these disorders compare in functional impairment, health care use, and comorbid depressive and somatic symptom burden? Third, how effective is a brief anxiety measure in screening for each disorder? Compared with previous research, our study is particularly well-positioned to ascertain commonalities among anxiety diagnoses that are traditionally considered to be discrete and to determine whether a single measure can be used as a first step, common metric. This is especially salient for the busy, complex primary care setting, in which simplifying initial recognition of mental disorders may in fact make wider efforts at recognition more feasible. Methods Patient Sample The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) anxiety study (26) was conducted to develop a short measure to assess generalized anxiety disorder. Patients were enrolled from a research network of 15 primary care sites (13 family practice and 2 internal medicine sites) located in 12 states and administered centrally by Clinvest, Inc., Springfield, Missouri, from November 2004 to June 2005. The Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)-7 scale was developed and validated in 2149 patients. In the original study, 2982 persons were invited to participate; of these, 2740 (92%) completed the 4-page questionnaire and had no or minimal missing data (26). To minimize sampling bias, consecutive patients were approached at each site in clinic sessions until the target quota for that week was achieved. Of the 2740 participants, the first 2149 were used for development and validation of the GAD-7 scale, whereas the last 591 were used to determine the testretest reliability of the scale. Of the 2149 patients in the validation group, 1654 agreed to a telephone interview, of whom 965 were randomly selected to undergo this interview within 1 week of their clinic visit by 1 of 2 mental health professionals: a clinical psychologist (with a PhD) or a senior psychiatric social worker. Contact information was sent by fax to each interviewer, who shuffled the fax sheets received each day and then drew from the stack several participants to interview that day. The 965 interviewed patients comprise the study population for this paper, and compared with the 1184 participants who did not undergo a mental health professional interview, these were more often women (69% vs. 63%; P= 0.003) and had slightly higher GAD-7 anxiety scores (5.7 vs. 5.1; P= 0.010) but were similar in age, race, and education. Of note, we only used data from the 1184 participants not undergoing a mental health professional interview to derive the GAD-7 (26). The study was approved by the Sterling Institutional Review Board. Study Questionnaire Before seeing their physicians, patients completed a 4-page questionnaire that included the GAD-7 (Appendix Figure). This scale was shown to have good internal and testretest reliability, as well as convergent, construct, criterion, procedural, and factorial validity for the diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder (26). Scores on the GAD-7 range from 0 to 21; scores of 5, 10, and 15 represent mild, moderate, and severe anxiety symptoms, respectively. The first 2 items of the GAD-7 represent core anxiety symptoms, and scores on this GAD-2 subscale range from 0 to 6. Appendix Figure. The Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)-7 scale. The first 2 items constitute the GAD-2 subscale. GAD-7 2006 Pfizer Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission. The study questionnaire also included questions about age, sex, education, race or ethnicity, and marital status; the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form-20 (SF-20), which measures functional status in 6 domains (27); the 10-item anxiety subscale from the Hopkins Symptom Checklist (28); the PHQ-8 depression scale (29); a 3-item version of the Social Phobia Inventory (Mini-SPIN) (30); the 5-item PHQ panic module (25); and the PHQ-15 somatic symptom scale (31). Also, single-item global assessments of anxiety, depression, and pain based on a scale of 0 (none) to 10 (as bad as you can imagine) were included. Finally, patients reported the number of physician visits and disability days during the previous 3 months. Structured Psychiatric Interview The 2 mental health professionals, while blinded to the results of the self-report research questionnaire, conducted structured psychiatric interviews by telephone to establish independent criteria-based diagnoses according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV) (32). The interview consisted of the generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and PTSD sections of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID) (33). Reinterview by telephone was used because of its feasibility in our multisite study and its demonstrated comparability with face-to-face research interviews (3436). The 2 mental health professionals based diagnoses of generalized anxiety disorder and PTSD on the SCID interview. For generalized anxiety disorder, some questions were slightly modified to better assess each DSM-IV criterion. They based a diagnosis of social anxiety disorder on whether the patient met SCID diagnostic criteria and had a Mini-SPIN score of 8 or greater, because this improves the accuracy of social anxiety disorder diagnoses (37). They based a diagnosis of panic disorder on answering yes to all 5 questions on the PHQ panic module, a threshold that reflects DSM-IV criteria and has been validated in both clinical (25) and population-based (38) samples. Statistical Analysis We estimated sample size with respect to sensitivity of the GAD-7 scale for diagnosing the target disease (generalized anxiety disorder). We needed 60 participants with generalized anxiety disorder to ensure that the total width of the 95% CI around a sensitivity proportion of 0.80 was no greater than 0.20. Given that the estimated prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder in the primary care population was 6% (18), we needed a total of 1000 unselected primary care patients to have approximately 60 patients with generalized anxiety disorder. We determined the prevalence of each of the 4 anxiety disorders and compared them in patient demographic characteristics, functional status, psychiatric comorbidity, disability days, and physician visits. Consistent with previous work (1, 26, 29, 39), we replaced missing values in a scale with the mean value of the remaining items if 25% or fewer items were missing. If more than 25% of items were missing, the sum score was not computed and was counted as missing. The amount of missing data for any individual variable or scale score was very low (<1%). The 15 sites did not differ in missing data. In addition to descriptive statistics, we used analysis of covariance to examine associations among each anxiety disorder and the 6 SF-20 functional status scales, self-reported disability days, and physician visitscontrolling for demographic variables (sex, age, race, and educational level) and study site. We ran similar models to examine the effect of the number of anxiety disorders. In all models, patients with no anxiety disorder were the reference group. We adjusted pairwise statistical comparisons by using the Bonferroni correction. Because some dependent variables displayed a skewed (but unimodal) distribution, we also reran the models using the rank transformation of the dependent variables. We examined the operating characteristics (sensitivity, specificity, and positive likelihood ratio) for a range of cutoff scores of the GAD-7 and GAD-2 for each anxiety disorder. We conducted receiver-operating characteristic curve analyses to determine the area under the curve (AUC) for each anxiety disorder. We calculated AUCs and performed statistical comparisons (GAD-7 vs. GAD-