PHQ-9, CES-D, health insurance data—who is identified with depression? A Population-based study in persons with diabetes

Abstract

Key points Patients with diabetes often have comorbid depression. Those patients are struggling to meet their treatment goals. Thus, they have a higher risk of getting diabetes related complications as for example coronary heart diseases. A lot of different tools and instruments are available to diagnose depression, to screen for depression among patients with diabetes or to identify depression symptoms or depressive disorder in clinical or epidemiological studies, including interview, questionnaires or claims data. It would be helpful to know if the tools that are used identify the same people or, if this is not the case, whether people identified by different tools have different characteristics or health outcomes. We found that different methods do not identify the same people with depression. There was no clear pattern of differences between the identified groups, however, we found some initial indications that the method chosen is related to particular underlying characteristics in the population identified. Further research with larger data sets is necessary to see if there are differences among the persons that are identified by different tools to give recommendations which screening tool to use for what purpose.

Keywords

• Depressive disorder diagnosis
• Depressive disorder epidemiology
• Diabetes Mellitus Type 2 psychology
• Diabetes complications