ArticleBMC psychiatry2018
Distributional patterns of item responses and total scores on the PHQ-9 in the general population: data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
Article in BMC psychiatry, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- Validation of the patient health questionnaire-9 and the generalized anxiety disorder-7 in Lithuanian student sample.PloS one · 2022Trial
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- An Item-Level Analysis of Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) Among Adolescents in Primary Care.Clinical practice in pediatric psychology · 2026Article
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- Prediction of depressive disorder using machine learning approaches: findings from the NHANES.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2025Article
- Fusion of multiple self-diagnostic questionnaires into optimal diagnostic cut-offs and factor analysis for depression characterization of the Korean university student group.BMC psychiatry · 2024Article
- Language sentiment predicts changes in depressive symptoms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Mental health attitudes, norms, beliefs, and experiences with care among young Black men: A theory of planned behavior assessment.Psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy · 2024Article
- Psychometric evaluation and community norms of the PHQ-9, based on a representative German sample.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Pharmacotherapy guideline concordance for major depressive disorder and its link to functioning via symptom change.Journal of clinical and translational science · 2024Article
- Inattentive responding can induce spurious associations between task behaviour and symptom measures.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Major depressive disorder.Nature reviews. Disease primers · 2023Review
- Depression and anxiety among multiethnic middle school students: Age, gender, and sociocultural environment.The International journal of social psychiatry · 2023Article
- Family function, anxiety and depression in adults with disabilities: a network analysis.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- The moderating role of sexual minority status in the associations of the experience and tolerance of shame-related emotions to suicide risk.Journal of clinical psychology · 2022Article
- Racial and Ethnic Disparities: Essential Workers, Mental Health, and the Coronavirus Pandemic.The Review of Black political economy · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundRecently, item responses and total scores on depression screening scales have been reported to have characteristic distributions in the general population. The distributional pattern of responses to the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) in the general population has not been well studied. Thus, we carried out a pattern analysis of the PHQ-9 item responses and total scores in US adults.
methodsData (5372 individuals) were drawn from the 2013-2014 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in the United States. The item responses and total score distributions of the PHQ-9 data were investigated with graphical analysis and exponential regression model.
resultsLines of item responses showed the same pattern among the nine items, characterized by crossing at a single point between "not at all" and "several days" and a parallel pattern from "several days" to "nearly every day" on a log-normal scale. The total score distribution of the PHQ-9 exhibited an exponential pattern, except for at the lower end of the distribution.
conclusionsThe present results support that the item responses and total scores on the PHQ-9 in the general population show the same characteristic patterns, consistent with the previous studies using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) and Kessler Screening Scale for Psychological Distress (K6).
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