Is the Eating Disorder Questionnaire-Online (EDQ-O) a valid diagnostic instrument for the DSM-IV-TR classification of eating disorders?

Background: The Eating Disorder Questionnaire-Online (EDQ-O) is an online self-report questionnaire, which was developed specifically to provide a DSM-IV-TR classification of anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), binge-eating disorder (BED), and eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS), without using a face-to-face clinical interview.

Objective: The purpose of the present study was to examine the psychometric quality of the EDQ-O.

Methods: The validity of the EDQ-O was determined by examining the agreement with the diagnoses obtained from the Longitudinal, Expert, and All DATA (LEAD) standard. Participants included 134 new patients of a specialist center for eating disorders located in the Netherlands.

Results: Assessment of the validity of the EDQ-O yielded acceptable to good AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) values with a range from 0.72 to 0.83. Most other diagnostic efficiency statistics were also good except for a low sensitivity for AN (0.44), a low positive predictive value for BN (0.50), and a relatively low sensitivity for BED (0.66).

Conclusion: The results of the present study suggest that the EDQ-O performs acceptably as a diagnostic instrument for all DSM-IV-TR eating disorder classifications. However, suggestions are made to further improve the validity of the EDQ-O.