Evaluating the diagnostic properties of the Whooley questionnaire as a case-finding instrument for depression among Chinese women during and after pregnancy

Abstract

Purpose: There is a rising prevalence in undetected perinatal depression in many countries, more effort in screening and early identification of perinatal depression is needed. While the Whooley questionnaire is the recommended case-finding strategy for perinatal depression, there is no validated Chinese version. The aim was to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy and stability of the translated Chinese Whooley questionnaire against gold standard measurement during and early after pregnancy.

Materials and Methods: This observational study recruited 131 pregnant women from an antenatal clinic in Hong Kong from September 2019 to May 2020. We translated the Whooley questionnaire in Chinese and evaluated self-reported responses against an interviewer-assessed diagnostic standard (DSM-IV criteria) in 107 women at 26–28 gestational weeks. We calculated sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, positive likelihood ratio, negative likelihood ratio and diagnostic odds ratio, with DSM-IV diagnosis as the gold standard.

Results: The Chinese Whooley questions had a sensitivity of 79% (95% CI 54.4–93.9), a specificity of 97% (95% CI 90.4–99.3), a positive likelihood ratio of 23.2 (95% CI 7.4–72.1) and a negative likelihood ratio of 0.2 (95% CI 0.1–0.5) in identifying perinatal depression.

Conclusion: The translated Chinese Whooley questionnaire has an acceptable diagnostic accuracy in identifying perinatal depression. It can be implemented in health services among Cantonesespeaking Chinese population.

Keywords:

• Pregnancy
• depression
• perinatal depression
• mass screening
• whooley questionnaire
• scale validation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Seed Funding, University of Hong Kong under Grant 201711159208. The funding source had no role in study design, conduct, data analysis and interpretation, manuscript writing, and dissemination of results.