According to a recent study published in the American Diabetes Association journal Diabetes Care, the score results of commonly used depression-screening methods should be carefully altered to better detect the illness in teenagers with Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1D). The study, conducted by researchers from Primary Children′s Hospital and Nemours Children′s Health in Jacksonville, evaluated the efficacy of such depression screeners for the teen population when compared to diagnostic interviews. Several studies have shown that teenagers with T1D are more likely to develop depression in comparison to their counterparts. On the other hand, depression can lead to poor glycemic control and poor blood glucose monitoring, thereby resulting in frequent hospitalizations. Hence, regular depression screening is advised by national and international standards for all diabetic teenagers.

For the study, the research team enrolled 100 T1D teenagers (aged 12 to 17) and conducted clinical interviews with each one of them, which are regarded as the gold standard for identifying depression, followed by asking them to complete five regularly used depression screening tools, each of which takes one to three minutes to complete. Dr. Arwen M. Marker, Ph.D., a pediatric psychology fellow at Primary Children′s Hospital of Salt Lake City, stated that they thought they might need to increase the cut-off scores for accuracy with the teen population, thinking that symptoms common to diabetes and depression would inflate the number of depression diagnoses, suggesting more were depressed when actually diabetes symptoms were the cause. However, they found the opposite result, i.e., they needed to lower cut-off scores to accurately identify youth with depressive symptoms.

He explained that most of the screening tools evaluated in the study were made with adults in mind. None were designed expressly for people with T1D, and none had been demonstrated to reliably identify adolescent depression in the past. Researchers suggested that diabetes care professionals employ the CDI-2 Short, PHQ-9A, and SMFQ, which have been shown to have the highest accuracy in this population. Even Dr. Susana Patton, Ph.D., ABPP, CDE, a principal research scientist at Nemours Children′s Health in Jacksonville, added that without the right sensitivity cut-offs, even the most accurate screening tools can miss a depressed teen, resulting in the affected individual not receiving mental health services. 

(Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/health/teens-with-diabetes-should-be-screened-for-depression-with-caution-study-101663300150535.html )