Clinical and Linguistic Aspects for Development of the Geriatric Anxiety Scale

Abstract

In modern clinical practice, there are many conditions and diseases that cannot be detected by diagnostic testing alone due to their poorly understood pathogenesis. This is particularly true for somatoform, stress-related, and anxiety-depressive disorders: they are primarily diagnosed based on the patient’s narrative and the input of their family members, which thus highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the above-stated problem and defines an area ripe for further research in clinical linguistics. This article provides a brief analysis of the psychometric tools commonly used in the diagnostic screening for anxiety and depressive disorders among patients of various profiles. The obtained results show that most screening methods lack any nosological specificity or validity for geriatric practice. A new variant of the geriatric anxiety scale (GAS) was developed with the clinical and linguistic profiles of elderly patients taken into account.