Browsing by Author "Ainetdin, Heidiye"

Abstract Background Examining patients with bipolar disorder, surprisingly many suffer from a comorbid eating disorder. The general practices could benefit from a sensitive and specific screening instrument that could be used routinely when examining whether the patients with bipolar disorder simultaneously suffer from disordered eating. An eating disorder is a very serious disease, which can be lethal at its worst. It stays unnoticed many times by the clinics, if not paid extra attention to. For this reason, a regularly conducted screening questionnaire could raise the possibility of disordered eating in patients into clinics attention. The objective of this study was to examine whether a modified version of the screening questionnaire SCOFF would suit this aim.¨ Methods We compared the results received with the golden standard questionnaire for eating disorders EDE-Q, with the answers from the shorter screening questionnaire SCOFF. Disordered eating was diagnosed based on DMS-5 criteria, and the statistical analysis was performed using IBM SPSS statistic version 25. Results When studying whether the modified screening tool SCOFF-rev could find the cases discovered with EDE-Q, the established cut-off point of ≥1 was used. The values for diagnostic accuracy were 81.8% (sensitivity), 73.8% (specificity), 86.7% (positive predictive value) and 52.9% (negative predictive value). Due to its low specificity, few false-positive cases were diagnosed, restricting the usability of SCOFF-rev. Furthermore, SCOFF-rev found only 29% of the purging cases discovered with EDE-Q, which limits its usefulness even further. Limitations The most significant restriction in our study was the small cohort group. Moreover, we used a screening tool modified from two different screening tools in our study, which we modified even further to be statistically adequate. Conclusions The SCOFF-rev functioned acceptably as a screening tool for disordered eating in patients with bipolar disorder. However, it could be preferable to create an entirely new screening tool that would be aimed specifically towards bipolar disordered patients, instead of modifying an existing tool created for the general population. This way the characteristics of bipolar disorder could be taken into consideration and make the tool more directed towards its’ target group. Further research should be made to establish the optimal screening tool for disordered eating with patients suffering from bipolar disorder.