Not Always That EASI: Validating the Russian Version of the Epilepsy Anxiety Survey Instrument and Its Brief Counterpart.

Objective: To develop a Russian version of The Epilepsy Anxiety Survey Instrument (EASI) and assess its psychometric properties in a Russian sample of patients with epilepsy (PWE). To compare the brief ver-sion of EASI with the General Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) - the most common tool for a rapid anxiety screening.Methods: The study sample consisted of 181 consecutive Russian-speaking PWE. The Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview was used as a gold standard for diagnosing anxiety disorders. All patients completed the set of questionnaires - the Russian version of the GAD-7, The Neurological Disorders Depression Inventory for Epilepsy (NDDI-E), and the EASI. Internal reliability of the EASI and brEASI, con-vergent and divergent validity of the brEASI with the GAD-7 and the NDDI-E, and factor structure assess-ment were performed.Results: Among 33.7% of patients with epilepsy diagnosed with any anxiety disorder, 16% had panic dis-order, 10.5% had agoraphobia, 8.3% had social anxiety disorder, 21.0% had generalized anxiety disorder, and 13.3% had several comorbid anxiety disorders. The EASI factor structure differed from the original, revealing an additional factor with two items. Nevertheless, the brief version (brEASI) showed excellent screening properties - the AUC to detect any anxiety disorder was 0.916 with the optimal cutoff point > 7 points.Conclusion: The brEASI performed better than the GAD-7 in our sample and, therefore, may be considered a first-line screening tool for anxiety disorders in PWE.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.