BACKGROUND: A 10-question screening scale of @entity458 and a six-question short-form scale embedded within the 10-question scale were developed for the redesigned US National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). METHODS: Initial pilot questions were administered in a US national mail survey (N = 1401). A reduced set of questions was subsequently administered in a US national telephone survey (N = 1574). The 10-question and six-question scales, which we refer to as the @entity7434 , were constructed from the reduced set of questions based on Item Response Theory models. The scales were subsequently validated in a two-stage clinical reappraisal survey (N = 1000 telephone screening interviews in the first stage followed by N = 153 face-to-face clinical interviews in the second stage that oversampled first-stage respondents who screened positive for emotional problems) in a local convenience sample. The second-stage sample was administered the screening scales along with the @entity922 ( @entity922 ). The K6 was subsequently included in the 1997 (N = 36116) and 1998 (N = 32440) US National Health Interview Survey, while the @entity7434 was included in the 1997 (N = 10641) Australian National Survey of Mental Health and Well-Being. RESULTS: Both the @entity7434 have good precision in the 90th-99th percentile range of the population distribution (standard errors of standardized scores in the range 0.20-0.25) as well as consistent psychometric properties across major sociodemographic subsamples. The scales strongly discriminate between community cases and non-cases of DSM-IV/ @entity2383 , with areas under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.87-0.88 for disorders having @entity177 ( @entity177 ) scores of 0-70 and 0.95-0.96 for disorders having @entity177 scores of 0-50. CONCLUSIONS: The brevity, strong psychometric properties, and ability to discriminate DSM-IV cases from non-cases make the @entity7434 and K6 attractive for use in general-purpose health surveys. The scales are already being used in annual government health surveys in the US and Canada as well as in the WHO World Mental Health Surveys. Routine inclusion of either the @entity7434 or K6 in clinical studies would create an important, and heretofore missing, crosswalk between community and clinical epidemiology.

Short screening scales to monitor population prevalences and trends in non-specific XXXX .

@entity458 :: ('MESH:D020018', 'Disease') :: ['psychological distress'] @entity177 :: ('MESH:D051437', 'Disease') :: ['GAF', 'Global Assessment of Functioning'] @entity7434 :: ('3858', 'Gene') :: ['K10 and K6', 'K10'] @entity922 :: ('MESH:D013568', 'Disease') :: ['SCID', 'Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV'] @entity2383 :: ('MESH:D028361', 'Disease') :: ['SCID disorders']
@entity458 :: (MESH:D020018,Disease) :: ['psychological distress']
