Brief Screen to Identify 5 of the Most Common Forms of Psychosocial Distress in Cardiac Patients

OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate a brief psychosocial screening tool (Screening Tool for Psychological Distress [STOP-D]) for use in the outpatient cardiology setting. BACKGROUND: Psychosocial factors contribute significantly to the morbidity and mortality associated with coronary artery disease. Yet, it is often considered overly burdensome to implement full-scale psychological assessments for every patient. METHODS: Over 3 months, 194 cardiac patients were consecutively recruited from 3 cardiac clinics: heart transplant (pre and post), cardiac rehabilitation, and adult congenital heart. Subjects filled out a questionnaire that included: (1) demographics, (2) STOP-D, (3) Beck Depression Inventory-II, (4) Beck Anxiety Inventory, (5) State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2, and (6) MOS Social Support Survey. RESULTS: Analyses reveal all STOP-D items are highly correlated with the corresponding measures and have robust receiver operating characteristic curves. Severity scores on STOP-D-depression and STOP-D-anxiety correlate well with established severity cutoff scores on the Beck Depression Inventory and the Beck Anxiety Inventory, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the STOP-D performs very well when compared with other longer and validated measures. The STOP-D is a 5-item self-report measure, which provides severity scores for: depression, anxiety, stress, anger, and poor social support. The STOP-D is self-administered and takes between 1 and 2 minutes to fill out, gives valid severity scores on 5 key areas of psychological distress (depression, anxiety, stress, anger, and poor social support), requires no scoring, and is free to use.