Abstract
Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in the primary care setting and are responsible for significant morbidity as well as a loss of productivity. Evaluation by mental health specialists and behavioral specialists can sometimes be confounded with problems of availability, accessibility, and the patient’s hesitancy to talk to new providers due to lack of prior relationship and trust. Primary care providers already have the advantage of being available for their patients, and have built years of trust behind them to strengthen this relationship. The biggest problems which confront primary care are the time constraints as well as the presence of multiple medical demands. This leads to a constant need for tools that facilitate early recognition and diagnosis of mental health disorders while also providing judicious utilization of clinic time. This article attempts to review the use of two of these popular tools: Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale-2 (GAD-2) and GAD-7 in the primary care setting.
Highlights
BackgroundAnxiety is a normal human emotion, but sometimes it can become excessive, and pervasive, and instead assumes pathological significance, and becomes a disorder
The anxiety disorder potentially starts affecting the instrumental activities of daily living (IADL), which comprise activities like driving, cleaning, managing finances [1]
There had been multiple suggestions to shorten the questionnaire further and use only the first two questions of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale-7 (GAD-7), which relate to the two main problems of generalized anxiety disorder
Summary
Anxiety is a normal human emotion, but sometimes it can become excessive, and pervasive, and instead assumes pathological significance, and becomes a disorder. Primary care providers who are working diligently to provide care for their patients on issues of competing medical importance, within the limited time constraints, can find diagnosing these anxiety disorders quite challenging This has created a need for screening tools that are efficient, reliable, comprehensible, easy to administer, and reproducible. The Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale-7 (GAD-7) is a seven-item diagnostic tool validated in both the primary care setting and the general population [3]. It has been found to have great psychometric properties and is short and easy to administer This allows the GAD-7 to be used in remote health surveys, epidemiologic studies, and in primary care settings [17]. Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by the following problems
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