Differentiating elderly medical and psychiatric outpatients with the Beck Anxiety Inventory. Assessment

To ascertain whether self-reported anxious symptoms differentiated elderly (2 60 years old) medical and psychiatric outpatients, the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) was adminis-tered to 45 medical outpatients without psychiatric disorders and 117 psychiatric outpa-tients with mixed DSM-ZZZ-I? disorders. The coefficicnt alphas of the BAI for the medical and psychiatric outpatients were 0.86 and 0.90, respcctivcly. The mean BAI score (19.19, SD = 11.71) of the psychiatric outpatients was approximately 2.7 times higher than that (7.20, SD = 6.68) of the medical outpatients. Although the means for 15 of the 21 BAI symptoms were significantly lower in the medical outpatients than in the psychiatric outpatients, a stepwise discriminant-function analysis indicated that only two symptoms-fear of the worst happening and umteudj-contributed unique variance to the differentia-tion of the two groups. The results are discussed as supporting the use of the BAI with elderly outpatients. In reviewing studies about the assessment of anxi-ety in geriatric patients, Hersen and Van Hasselt (1992) reported that the prevalence of clinical anxiety in the elderly may range from 10 % to 20%, but Flint (1994) has more recently indicated that the prevalence may be 10 % or less. The detection The authors would like to thank hlarvin Herring and hIarcella Freed for their help in collecting the patient data. Correspondence should be addressed to Robert A. Steer