Do supplementary items on the eating disorder examination improve the assessment of adolescents with anorexia nervosa?

Assessment Measures for Child and Adolescent Eating Disorders: A Review

BACKGROUND

  Several diagnostic and screening instruments are available for child and adolescent eating disorders. However, limitations have been identified in many of these.

METHOD

  We review the most frequently used assessment measures for eating disorders in children and adolescents.

RESULTS

  Several of the available instruments have significant limitations, although relevant strengths are identified.

CONCLUSIONS

  Limitations in the current available instruments for child and adolescent eating disorders should be addressed in order to improve recognition and treatment.

Diagnosing eating disorders in adolescents: a comparison of the eating disorder examination and the development and well-being assessment

OBJECTIVE

To compare the diagnostic properties of the Eating Disorder Examination (EDE) and the online version of the Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA).

METHOD

Fifty-Seven adolescents (mean age 15.7 years) who attended consecutive assessments at a specialist eating disorders clinic completed the DAWBA, the EDE, and a standard clinical assessment with a multidisciplinary team. Cohen's Kappas were used to make pairwise comparisons between the diagnoses generated by the three assessments.

RESULTS

Participants had anorexia nervosa (n = 30), eating disorders NOS (n = 21) or no eating disorder (n = 6) according to the clinical diagnosis. Agreement between the clinical and DAWBA diagnoses was moderate (kappa = 0.59), agreement between the DAWBA and EDE diagnoses was fair (kappa = 0.21), and agreement between the clinical and EDE diagnoses was poor (kappa = 0.10). The EDE did not identify an eating disorder in 20 participants (35% of the sample) who were clinically assessed as cases.

CONCLUSION

Computerized measures using multiple informants may be more suitable for assessing clinical samples of adolescents with anorexia nervosa or eating disorders NOS than individual interviews with young people.