Depression Subscale of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale applied preoperatively in spinal surgery

objective: to evaluate the accuracy of the depression subscale of hospital anxiety and depression scale (hads-d) in spine surgery, comparing it to beck depression inventory (bdi). methods: in a cross-sectional study, the hads-d and the bdi were applied to patients undergoing spine surgery for lumbar (n=139) or cervical spondylosis (n=17). spearman correlation tests for hads-d and bdi were applied. the internal consistency of hads-d was estimated by cronbach's alpha coefficient. results: according to the bdi, the prevalence of depression was of 28.8% (n=45). the spearman r coefficient between hads-d and bdi was 0.714 (p<0.001). cronbach's alpha for hads-d was 0.795. the area of the roc curve was 0.845. using a cutoff for hads-d >10, there was a sensitivity of 71.1%, specificity of 95.4%, and positive likelihood-ratio of 15.78. conclusions: hads-d showed a strong correlation with bdi and good reliability. hads-d is a good alternative for screening depression and assessing its severity.