Diagnosing eating disorders in adolescents: A comparison of the eating disorder examination and the development and well‐being assessment

Abstract

To compare the diagnostic properties of the Eating Disorder Examination (EDE) and the online version of the Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA). Fifty-Seven adolescents (mean age 15.7 years) who attended consecutive assessments at a specialist eating disorders clinic completed the DAWBA, the EDE, and a standard clinical assessment with a multidisciplinary team. Cohen's Kappas were used to make pairwise comparisons between the diagnoses generated by the three assessments. Participants had anorexia nervosa (n = 30), eating disorders NOS (n = 21) or no eating disorder (n = 6) according to the clinical diagnosis. Agreement between the clinical and DAWBA diagnoses was moderate (kappa = 0.59), agreement between the DAWBA and EDE diagnoses was fair (kappa = 0.21), and agreement between the clinical and EDE diagnoses was poor (kappa = 0.10). The EDE did not identify an eating disorder in 20 participants (35% of the sample) who were clinically assessed as cases. Computerized measures using multiple informants may be more suitable for assessing clinical samples of adolescents with anorexia nervosa or eating disorders NOS than individual interviews with young people.