Fibromyalgia & musculoskeletal pain
Screening for Anxiety, Depression, and Fibromyalgia in Routine Care of All Rheumatic Diagnoses on a Multidimensional Health Assessment Questionnaire (MDHAQ)
Authors' conclusion
Positive anxiety, depression, and/or FM screens in 44% of routine care patients who have significantly higher pain scores agree with extensive research findings
Study context
- Population
- Unselected routine care patients with 15 rheumatic diagnoses in 5 categories (inflammatory, connective tissue, noninflammatory, bone mineral disorders, primary fibromyalgia (FM)), Rush Universityexcluding primary FM
- Participants
- 1,337 patients
- Exposure
- Patients with any of 3 positive screens vs all negative screens
- Outcome
- Frequencies of positive MDHAQ anxiety, depression and FM screening indices
Methodological detailsroutine care, single-centre
- Routine care
- Single-centre
Main finding
As reported in the abstract
Positive MDHAQ screens
Positive anxiety screen
30%
Positive depression screen
24%
Positive nonprimary FM screen
25%
Any of the 3 multimorbidity screens
44%
Observational data: associations, not effects.
Further findings
Pain (0-10 visual numeric scale)
RAPID3 (0-30)
Positive screens across rheumatic diagnosis categories (range)
- Anxiety
- 17-39%
- Depression
- 9-33%
- Nonprimary FM
- 7-31%
- Any multimorbidity screen
- 30-52%
Original publication
Screening for Anxiety, Depression, and Fibromyalgia in Routine Care of All Rheumatic Diagnoses on a Multidimensional Health Assessment Questionnaire (MDHAQ). J Rheumatol. Published 15 March 2026. doi:10.
Composed by AI from the published abstract and checked against it. How Briefs are made →