Validation of Munozs Mood Screener in a nonclinical Spanish population

This study evaluates the utility of Munoz's Mood Screener for detection of major depressive episodes in a nonclinical Spanish population. The Mood Screener was administered by face-to-face interview to 554 subjects (65.9% women; age 18-34 years) who were recruited by stratified random sampling from a population of 27,587 university students. Thereafter, two expert clinicians who were blind to the Mood Screener results independently administered a clinical interview (SCID-CV) as an aid in evaluating the subjects for the same disorder. K for agreement between the clinicians' consensus diagnosis and the Mood Screener was 0.758, and with the clinicians' diagnosis as reference the Mood Screener had a sensitivity of 0.969, a specificity of 0.967, positive and negative predictive values of 0.646 and 0.998, respectively, and positive and negative likelihood ratios of 29.75 and 0.032, respectively. These results support the interviewer-administered Mood Screener as a valid instrument for screening for major depressive episodes in the target population.