Assessment of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) performance for the diagnosis of anxiety in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus

Neuropsychiatric lupus (NPSLE) is described in 12–95% of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Anxiety disorders are among the most frequent manifestations of NPSLE, occurring in 4–85% of these patients. Several diagnostic tools, such as Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), have been used to assess anxiety in clinical studies in SLE, but there is a lack of data on the performance of these questionnaires in the disease. This study aimed to assess the performance of HADS for the detection of anxiety in male and female patients with SLE, also investigating possible gender differences in this aspect. This study included 54 male SLE patients and 54 female SLE patients. The Diagnostic Criteria for Generalized Anxiety Disorder of the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was used as gold-standard method to assess the performance of HADS for detecting anxiety in SLE patients. HADS presented sensitivity of 88.9% and specificity of 92.6%, with positive and negative predictive values of 80.0 and 96.1%, respectively. The HADS accuracy in total sample was 92.6%, with Kappa coefficient equal to 0.5794 (95% CI 0.3894–0.7695). No significant differences were observed between female and male groups regarding the performance of HADS for diagnosing anxiety.