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J Occup Rehabil (2012) 22:5158 DOI 10.1007/s10926-011-9320-6
Validation of the PHQ-15 for Somatoform Disorder in the Occupational Health Care Setting
Lars de Vroege Rob Hoedeman Jasper Nuyen
Klaas Sijtsma Christina M. van der Feltz-Cornelis
Published online: 22 July 2011 The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract Introduction Within the occupational health setting, somatoform disorders are a frequent cause of sick leave. Few validated screening questionnaires for these disorders are available. The aim of this study is to validate the PHQ-15 in this setting. Methods In a cross-sectional study of 236 sicklisted employees, we studied the performance of the PHQ-15 in comparison with the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) as golden reference standard. We approached employees who were sick listed for a period longer than 6 weeks and shorter than 2 years for participation. This study was conducted on one location of a large occupation health service in the Netherlands, serving companies with more than 500 employees.
All employees who returned the PHQ-15 were invited for the MINI interview. Specicity and sensitivity were calculated for optimal cut point and a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) was constructed. Results A total of 107 participants consented to participate in the MINI interview. A non-response analysis showed no signicant differences between groups. According to the MINI, the prevalence of somatoform disorders was 21.5%, and the most frequent found disorder was a pain disorder. The PHQ-15 had an optimal cut point of 9 (patients scoring 9 or higher (C9) were most likely to suffer from a somatoform disorder), with specicity and sensitivity equal to 61.9 and56.5%, respectively. ROCs showed an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.63. Conclusion The PHQ-15 shows moderate sensitivity but limited efciency with a cut point of 9 and can be a useful questionnaire in the occupational health setting.
Keywords PHQ-15 Somatoform disorders
Validation study Occupational health setting
Specicity Sensitivity
Introduction
Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS) and somatoform disorders occur frequently in sicklisted employees at the workplace [1]. Somatoform disorders as dened as DSMIV category are established in this study by MINI interview. Frequently occurring somatoform disorders are pain disorders, which include pain with physical factors and pain with psychological factors. In this study, we use the term MUS for specic symptoms...