Construction of the Lebanese Anxiety Scale (LAS-10): a new scale to assess anxiety in adult patients

Abstract

Objective: The study objectives were (1) to create a new 10-item scale, the ‘Lebanese Anxiety Scale’ (LAS-10), inspired by the diagnostic criteria of DSM-5, and the HAM-A and STAI scales and (2) to evaluate the performance of this new scale on a sample of Lebanese individuals.

Methods: This cross-sectional study enrolled 1332 community dwelling participants between November 2017 and March 2018.

Results: In sample 1, the participants’ mean age was 28.08 years (63.9% females). The LAS items converged over a solution of two factors that had an Eigenvalue over 1, explaining a total of 51.97% of the variance (α_Cronbach=0.857). The optimal cut-off between healthy controls and anxious patients was 13.50 according to the ROC curve. The sensitivity and specificity were good at this cut-off (77.5% and 70.8%, respectively). The area under the curve was high: 0.811 [0.778–0.845]; p < .001. The positive predicted value of the LAS-10 score in sample 1 was 26.9%, whereas the negative predicted value was 95.2%.

Conclusion: The results of the present study show that the LAS-10 is a tool that can be used in clinical practice and research to screen for anxiety.

KEY POINTS

• The positive predicted value of the LAS-10 score was 26.9%.

• Its negative predicted value was 95.2%.

• People with scores above 13.5 be referred to a health care professional for further assessment.

• The LAS-10 is a tool can be used in clinical practice and research to screen for anxiety.

• Future studies are needed to validate the LAS-10 in other countries.

Keywords:

• Anxiety
• screening
• Lebanon
• scale
• psychometrics

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Mrs Timi Most for her support and help towards the publication of this paper and all participants who helped them during the data collection.

Disclosure statement

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