Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale Scoring

Illnesses that affect us have causes that are sometimes not manifested in an apparent manner.

Some diseases show symptoms of a totally different from what it really is.

Take for example the mental disease called somatoform. It is mental disorder that shows the symptoms of a totally different physical disease, in short it mimics a different illness, which will baffle clinicians.

There are certain mental conditions that are discovered to be directly affecting or sometimes the cause of certain chronic or acute diseases and the most affecting are anxiety and depression.

To be able to diagnose a patient and effect treatment well, mood disorders and their relation to the patients need to be assessed, most especially depression and anxiety.

Most of the time, this portion of medical analysis is bypassed or overlooked for different reasons. First, physicians are not fully trained to make that kind of analogy, and second, the doctor may come as not really in touch with the patient’s disorder. Because of this, the HADS or the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale scoring system was devised.

HADS or Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale is a simple scheme to assess the emotional disorder state of a patient. It is a series of very straightforward questions which will reveal the mood and depression level of an individual.

This questionnaire is ideally given before the actual doctor-patient consultation. Very frank queries like:

1. Do you worry a lot lately? Or have you been worrying a lot already before?
2. Are you experiencing panic attacks?
3. Do you sense an impending bad thing might happen?
4. Do you experience a sudden loss of interest on things that you used to be very fascinated with?
5. Do you feel jolly? Are you currently in good spirits? Do you still laugh as readily as you used to?

The first three questions are designed to measure a person’s anxiety level and the last two are usually posed to gauge the individual’s depression state.

Administration of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale scoring only takes a minimum of two minutes and a maximum of five minutes to administer.

To best indicate the patient’s emotional state in the past weeks, the questionnaire has to be completely finished, meaning all the questions need to be answered. And to gauge progress, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale scoring needs to be run again after a week and not less than that time frame.

Many doctors and other medical practitioners value the information being provided by the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale scoring. Many have found it to be an invaluable tool to understand the state of a patient further.