Fact or artifact--a comment on 'Subpopulations of early separation anxiety: relevance to risk of adult anxiety disorders'

Autor: Danielle Amado, Ariel Stravynski
Rok vydání: 2001
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of affective disorders. 66(2-3)
ISSN: 0165-0327
Popis: *In a recent paper, Manicavasagar et al. (1998) social phobics but 58% of all subjects with diagnoses have reported a test of the validity of the construct of of anxiety disorders, did not report high levels of ‘‘separation anxiety’’ (SA). To that end, a self-report early SA. Surprisingly, we find no comment on this instrument measuring retrospectively the level of seeming incongruity. early SA, was administered to composite samples of In light of this fact, namely that nearly 50% of the non-patients and patients with diagnoses of panic patients of every diagnostic stripe were low SA disorder / agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, scorers, the conclusion that the high early SA implies simple phobia, social phobia and residual major higher risk for adult anxiety disorders, seems hardly depressive disorder. warranted. By means of a cut-off point determined by statisti- In our view, the most theoretically interesting cal analysis, all subjects were classified as high comparisons would have been between the low and (above 13.8) or low (equal to or below 13.8) in early high scorers within each diagnostic category, and not SA. with the non-patients who for the most part reported In all subsequent statistical analyses (chi-square, low levels of SA. It is not obvious, aside from logistical regression), rates of low and high SA obtaining highly significant odds ratios, what is the non-patients were compared with rates of low and theoretical value of such comparisons. high SA subjects in various diagnostic categories‐ In sum, the reported results seem a triumph of mostly anxiety disorders‐listed above.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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