Assessment of patient-reported symptoms of anxiety

Patient self-reported symptoms are of crucial importance to identify anxiety disorders, as well as to monitor their treatment in clinical practice and research. Thus, for evidence-based medicine, a precise, reliable, and valid (ie, “objective”) assessment of the patient's reported “subjective” symptoms is warranted. There is a plethora of instruments available, which can provide psychometrically sound assessments of anxiety, but there are several limitations of current tools that need to be carefully considered for their successful use. Nevertheless, the empirical assessment of mental health status is not as accepted in medicine as is the assessment of biomarkers. One reason for this may be that different instruments assessing the same psychological construct use different scales. In this paper we present some new developments that promise to provide one common metric for the assessment of anxiety, to facilitate the general acceptance of mental health assessments in the future.