title: Use of a symptom scale to study the prevalence of a depressive syndrome in young adolescents.
abstract: The entire student enrollment (n = 624) in a public junior high school in Raleigh, North Carolina were visited in their homes between October 1978 and February 1979. Eleven (2.9%) of 384 students completing the Center for Epidemiologic Studies self-report depression scale reported symptoms patterns consistent with the Research Diagnostic Criteria for major depressive disorder. These 11 subjects were concentrated in the top 12% of the distribution of symptom scores and had symptom prevalences exceeding those in the overall study population by a factor of three or more. Black males from low income households predominated. A self-report questionnaire may be usable to detect a depressive "syndrome" in young adolescents. The prevalence of such a syndrome is similar to prevalence estimates for adults and young adolescents, but considerably lower than estimates derived from total scale scores and cutoff points. A syndrome-oriented analytic approach for symptom scales should be explored as an alternative to the use of cutoff scores for epidemiologic studies of psychiatric disorders.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001741:Black or African American; D002648:Child; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009657:North Carolina; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D044465:White People