Psychiatric screening among type II diabetic patients: Validity of the General Health Questionnaire-12

Objectives: Recent studies indicate that diabetes mellitus, may especially be associated with psychiatric morbidity. Moreover, certain symptoms may oc cur in regression analysis was performed to find out the best of the instru ment was tested by performing the diagnostic measures of sensitivity and sp ecificity. The stepwise both diabetes and psychiatric disorder. This necess itates the development of effective methods for identifying psychiatric dis order among diabetic patients. The aim of GHQ-12, this study is to investig ate the validity of the Arabic version of the 12-item General Health Questi onnaire (GHQ-12) as a screening instrument for psychiatric morbidity among Type II diabetic patients and to define the best cut-off point. Methods: The study was carried out in a primary health care center, in Al-A in, United Arab Emirates. A randomly selected sample (n=71) of non-hyperten sive, Type II diabetic, United Arab Emirate nationals, aged 31-73 years who were not suffering from any other chronic medical illness was studied. Stu dy subjects were interviewed by a primary health care physician, who assist ed them to complete a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Arabic version of the GHQ-12. Then, all subjects were interviewed by a psychiatrist using the Clinical Interview Schedule. Identified cases were assigned 10th versi on of International Classification of Diseases (ICD-IO) diagnoses. Correlat ion's were explored using Biserial, Kendall's tau and Spearman rank correla tion. The validity predictors for a psychiatric case. Discriminate function al analysis was used to assess the discriminatory powers of Results: rising the simple Likert scoring method (0,1,2,3), the best cut-of f point of the GHQ-12, that balances between sensitivity and specificity wa s 11/12 with a sensitivity of 81.4% and specificity of 77.8%. The total dis criminatory power of the GHQ-12 was 82%, and it was found to have a signifi cant concurrent validity. Questions 2,4 and 6 proved to be the best predict ors for psychiatric disorder. Conclusions: The Arabic version of the GHQ-12 proved to be a valid instrume nt for detecting non-psychotic psychiatric disorders among type II diabetic patients in primary health care settings.