Anxiety Disorder Screening in Primary Care

There has been a lot of movement in recent years about increased screening for depression but it's only more recent that attention has been coming to the need to screen for anxiety disorders in primary care as well. The GAD 7 is often recommended as the first one because even though it's most specific to generalized anxiety disorder it's pretty good at picking up the presence of some anxiety disorder. If you have a patient who screens positive you would still need to follow up with them to ask more questions like when did those symptoms onset and are they interfering with your day-to-day functioning or causing you distress?