The Depression Anxiety Stress Scale 8: Its Psychometric Evaluation Among Women with Chronic Non-Cancer Pelvic Pain

Amira Mohammed Ali, Amin Omar Hendawy, Rasmieh Al‐Amer, Ghada Shahrour, Esraa M. Ali, Abdulmajeed A. Alkhamees, Nashwa Ibrahim, Afaf Hassan Ahmed, Sahar Mansour Lamadah
In: Research Square · 2022 · doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-1212124/v1 · W4206445238
preprint OA: green CC0
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Abstract

Abstract Psychiatric comorbidity and abusive experiences in chronic pelvic pain (CPP) conditions may prolong disease course. This study investigated the psychometrics of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale 8 (DASS-8) among women with CPP (N = 214, mean age = 33.3 ± 12.4 years). The DASS-8 expressed excellent fit, invariance across age groups and menopausal status, good discriminant validity (differentiating women with psychiatric comorbidity from those without comorbidity: U = 2018.0, p = 0.001), excellent reliability (alpha = 0.90), adequate predictive and convergent validity indicated by strong correlation with the DASS-21 (r = 0.94) and high values of item-total correlations (r = 0.884 to 0.893). In two-step cluster analysis, it classified women into low and high distress clusters (n = 141 and 73), with significantly higher levels of distress, pain severity and duration, and physical symptoms in cluster 2. The DASS-8 correlated with pain severity/duration, depression/anxiety symptoms, sexual assault, fatigue, headache severity, and physical symptoms at the same level expressed by the parent scale, or even greater. Accordingly, distress may represent a target for early identification of psychiatric comorbidity, CPP severity, sexual assault, fatigue, etc. Therefore, the DASS-8 is a useful brief measure of mental symptoms among women with CPP.

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chronic_pelvic_pain

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