PROVIDENCE – A team at Rhode Island Hospital has developed a new way to diagnose and measure anxiety that takes less than a minute and a half to administer and less than 15 seconds to score, but has been proven to reliably identify the problem and gauge the severity of symptoms.
Developing a quick and easy tool like this is important, said Dr. Mark Zimmerman, director of outpatient psychiatry at the hospital, because studies have shown that only 11 percent of psychiatrists now routinely use standardized measures to assess depression or anxiety.
It’s easy to understand why, he said – clinicians “are already overburdened with paperwork,” so they’re unlikely to have time to do detailed evaluations with other existing tools.
“If the optimal delivery of mental health treatment ultimately depends on examining outcome,” he said, “then precise, reliable, valid, informative, and user-friendly measurement is critical to evaluating the quality and efficiency of care in clinical practice.”
The tool, developed by Zimmerman and his colleagues, is called CUXOS (Clinically Useful Anxiety Outcome Scale). A study of its effectiveness has been published online ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
In the study, nearly 1,000 psychiatric outpatients completed the CUXOS, and clinicians used the tool to rate the severity of their depression, anxiety and anger on standardized scales.
The researchers also had some patients complete a different test to help validate the results, and another group took the CUXOS twice.
Zimmerman, who is also an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, said the scale was found to have high internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Its results also matched anxiety scores from other self-reporting tools, but they didn’t match as closely with measures of depression, substance abuse problems, eating disorders and anger.
There are many other questionnaires available in psychiatry, but the study authors said the CUXOS stands out in several ways, including its ease of use. They said additional research should be done, however, to determine whether it’s better to use a single tool to identify several problems at once, or individual tools for individual disorders.
The study was based on work in the Rhode Island Methods to Improve Diagnostic Assessment and Services (MIDAS) Project, for which Zimmerman is the principal investigator.
