STATE ANXIETY ASSESSMENT IN CLINICAL PRACTICE

Abstract

STAI scales are widely used to measure anxiety levels. Preoperative quantitation of anxiety levels might be useful for more sensible premedication choice. We demonstrate the adjustment of STAI-6 scale to the Russian settings; this scale is more convenient for anxiety assessment in clinical environment. The adjusted scale is based on English STAI-6 developed for state anxiety levels screening. During the study (psychometric capability of the scale has been studied in a surgery department) the current validity and sensitivity of the ad- justed scale as well as correlation between prorated scores of the adjusted and full scales have been evaluated. The findings have revealed an acceptable correlation between results of the adjusted and full scales and a sufficient adjusted scale sensitivity to distinguish anxiety levels have been confirmed. The adjusted scale has the structure of the full scale with anxiety-present and anxiety-absent items as well as psychometric properties. Thus, the adjusted scale can be applied for state anxiety screening in situations when the lack of time makes the full-length scale usage difficult.