BACKGROUND Skin, which is the largest organ in the body, carries immense psychological significance. Disfiguring skin disorders may impact negatively on the mental health of individuals. AIM This study compared the psychiatric morbidity of subjects with leprosy and albinism. SUBJECTS AND METHODS One hundred subjects with leprosy and 100 with albinism were interviewed. Sociodemographic quest...

UNLABELLED The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) was designed by Goldberg in the 1970's as a screening instrument to provide information on the mental wellbeing. Although it is widely used as a unidimensional instrument, factor analyses tend to suggest that it contains more than one dimension. AIM The purpose of this paper is to review the factor-analytic research that has been carried out w...

OBJECTIVE To know the psychometric properties of the GHQ-28 when it is applied to a sample of opiate-dependent patients. METHOD Participants were 138 opiate-dependent patients. Reliability was estimated by means of the Cronbach's alpha and Spearman-Brown coefficients. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was applied to check the four-factor structure proposed by Goldberg and Hillier. The sensitivity ...

BACKGROUND This study describes differences in trajectories of self-reported mental health in an ageing cohort, according to their housing, while controlling for confounders. METHODS The General Health Questionnaire was measured on six occasions as part of Whitehall II cohort study of office-based British civil servants (1985-2009); 10,308 men and women aged 35-55 at baseline. RESULTS Home-...

The EUropean Research on Incapacitating DIseases and Social Support (EURIDISS) is an international longitudinal study focusing on patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). It elaborates on the impact of the chronic disease on patients’ daily lives. Rheumatoid arthritis, social support and quality of life are the central concepts within the project. Goldberg and Hillier’s 28-item scaled version o...

In Greenland, the rapid sociocultural change of the last 50 years has been paralleled by an epidemiological transition characterized by a reduction in infectious diseases, an increase in cancer and cardiovascular diseases, and an increased prevalence of mental health problems. During 1993-94 and 1997-98, two health interview surveys were conducted among Inuit in Greenland and Inuit migrants in ...

Recognizing patients at a higher risk of developing chronic low back pain (LBP) is important in industrial medicine. This study aimed to assess the power and quality of General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) for prediction of the odds of chronicity of acute LBP. This study was conducted on industrial workers. All subjects with acute LBP who met the inclusion criteria were enrolled. Demographic char...

BACKGROUND The mismatch between general practice and psychiatric diagnosis of psychological problems has been frequently reported. AIMS To identify which items from the 28-item general health questionnaire (GHQ-28) best predicted general practitioners' (GPs') own assessments of morbidity and the proportion of time spent in consultations on psychological problems. DESIGN OF STUDY Cross-secti...

BACKGROUND Invariant item ordering (IIO) is defined as the extent to which items have the same ordering (in terms of item difficulty/severity - i.e. demonstrating whether items are difficult [rare] or less difficult [common]) for each respondent who completes a scale. IIO is therefore crucial for establishing a scale hierarchy that is replicable across samples, but no research has demonstrated ...

BACKGROUND this study aimed to compare mental health of mothers of children with spina bifida with mothers of able-bodied controls. METHODS eighty-one mothers of children with spina bifida aged 1-18 years completed the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) and Parenting Stress Index Short Form (PSI/SF). The controls were 69 mothers of children with acute, non-disabling illnesses. Each chil...