Do Measures of Depressive Symptoms Function Differently in People with Spinal Cord Injury Versus Primary Care Patients: the CES-D, PHQ-9, and PROMIS-D

Overview

Journal Qual Life Res

Specialties Pharmacology
Rehabilitation Medicine

Date 2016 Jul 16

PMID 27416833

Citations 15

Authors

Karon F Cook

Michael A Kallen

Charles Bombardier

Alyssa M Bamer

Seung W Choi

Jiseon Kim

Rana Salem

Dagmar Amtmann

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Purpose: To evaluate whether items of three measures of depressive symptoms function differently in persons with spinal cord injury (SCI) than in persons from a primary care sample.

Methods: This study was a retrospective analysis of responses to the Patient Health Questionnaire depression scale, the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale, and the National Institutes of Health Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) version 1.0 eight-item depression short form 8b (PROMIS-D). The presence of differential item function (DIF) was evaluated using ordinal logistic regression.

Results: No items of any of the three target measures were flagged for DIF based on standard criteria. In a follow-up sensitivity analyses, the criterion was changed to make the analysis more sensitive to potential DIF. Scores were corrected for DIF flagged under this criterion. Minimal differences were found between the original scores and those corrected for DIF under the sensitivity criterion.

Conclusions: The three depression screening measures evaluated in this study did not perform differently in samples of individuals with SCI compared to general and community samples. Transdiagnostic symptoms did not appear to spuriously inflate depression severity estimates when administered to people with SCI.

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Bombardier C, Azuero C, Fann J, Kautz D, Richards J, Sabharwal S Top Spinal Cord Inj Rehabil. 2021; 27(2):152-224.

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