An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Adults ages 19 to 64 in the United States should be screened for anxiety disorders, according to a new recommendation from the US Preventive Services Task Force released Tuesday. The final recommendation, published in the medical journal JAMA, marks the first time the USPSTF has made a final recommendation on screening for anxiety disorders in adults, including those who are pregnant and postpartum. The task force found “insufficient evidence” to screen for anxiety in older adults. The USPSTF, a group of independent medical experts whose recommendations help guide doctors’ decisions and influence insurance plans, also continues to recommend that all adults be screened for major depressive disorder, including those who are pregnant or postpartum and older adults. The recommendation is consistent with the task force’s 2016 recommendation on depression screenings.
While rates of clinical depression had been rising steadily in the United States, they jumped significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic. In general, about 1 in 6 adults will have depression at some time in their life, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And although depression and anxiety are different conditions, they commonly can happen together — and such screening recommendations can help clinicians identify which patients may need treatment for both conditions or one versus the other. “Anxiety disorders are common, and they can really impact people’s quality of life, and what the task force found is that screening for anxiety disorders in the general adult population can lead to identifying these conditions early and then, if those people who are identified get linked up with appropriate care, they will benefit,” said Dr. Michael Silverstein, vice chair of the USPSTF and director of the Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute at Brown University. “So it really is extremely good news for the delivery of preventive services for the American public,” he said. “We also found that in the older adult population, which is defined as age 65 and older, that the task force really needs more evidence to weigh the risks and benefits of screening for anxiety disorders. And for that older adult population, we’re calling for urgent new research.”
USPSTF researchers noted in their anxiety screening recommendation statement that most people with anxiety disorders don’t receive treatment within the first year of symptoms, if ever — showing a need for more robust screening. “Only 11% of US adults with an anxiety disorder started treatment within the first year of onset; the median time to treatment initiation was 23 years,” the researchers wrote. “A US study of 965 primary care patients found that only 41% of patients with an anxiety disorder were receiving treatment for their disorder.” Once the new screening recommendations are practiced in the real world, the results may reveal that anxiety disorders are much more prevalent than previously thought, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, who was not involved in the recommendation statements. “Anxiety has been way under the radar for a long time, and so I think it’s good that they are recommending for the broad population to be screened. When we start screening for anxiety, we’re going to find a lot more of it than we thought we had,” he said.
“I think it’s an opportunity for us to get our hands around this crisis before we have a mental health emergency,” Benjamin added. “So we definitely have to do more. We know as a nation, we have under-invested in mental health. We have not put as much money into mental health. We have not been treating mental health at the same level as physical health. And we know that people who need mental health services are really struggling to find providers to care for them.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – For First Time, US Task Force Recommends Screening Adults For Anxiety Disorders