A single-item mood question adequately discriminates moderately severe to severe depression in individuals with persistent pain: preliminary validation.

Editor—Persisting pain and depression commonly co-occur, significantly impacting quality of life. 1 IsHak W.W. Wen R.Y. Naghdechi L. et al. Pain and depression: a systematic review. Harv Rev Psychiatry. 2018; 26: 352-363 Crossref PubMed Scopus (192) Google Scholar Considering depression in people with pain is clinically recommended. 2 Siu A.L. Bibbins-Domingo K. Grossman D.C. et al. Screening for depression in adults: US preventive services task force recommendation statement. JAMA. 2016; 315: 380-387 Crossref PubMed Scopus (990) Google Scholar Self-report depression screening tools allow practitioners to tailor treatment and determine the appropriateness of referral for further support. Concerns have been raised that multi-item screening tools, such as the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), are time-consuming to administer in therapeutic settings 3 Valderas J. Kotzeva A. Espallargues M. et al. The impact of measuring patient-reported outcomes in clinical practice: a systematic review of the literature. Qual Life Res. 2008; 17: 179-193 Crossref PubMed Scopus (540) Google Scholar and therefore create healthcare system burden that might impede access to treatment for those who most need it. 4 Thombs B.D. Coyne J.C. Cuijpers P. et al. Rethinking recommendations for screening for depression in primary care. CMAJ. 2012; 184: 413-418 Crossref PubMed Scopus (161) Google Scholar A potential solution to reduce the burden of currently available depression screening tools is developing a single-item tool. We created a single-item mood numerical rating scale (mNRS) that asked: ‘How would you rate your general mood this past week?’. We aimed to determine whether this single-item correlated with PHQ-9 scores and could adequately discriminate between those categorised by the PHQ-9 as having or not having moderately severe to severe depressive symptoms.