Mood Disorder Questionnaire—MDQ

The Mood Disorder Questionnaire (MDQ) is a questionnaire for screening bipolar spectrum disorders. In addition to applications in scientific research, MDQ is above all an extremely useful tool that can be used in everyday clinical practice conditions to quickly and easily identify patients at high risk for bipolar disorder. The questionnaire allows for only a preliminary, general and working diagnosis, and people with a positive result obtained using this tool should be subjected to further, in-depth diagnosis to verify the bipolar spectrum disorder [21–23].

MDQ is a one-page self-assessment questionnaire that can be completed by the patient or a doctor, nurse or other trained medical personnel. The duration of the questionnaire is estimated to be 5–10 min. It consists of three parts:

A short symptom checklist, consisting of 13 questions about manic or hypomanic symptoms in the patient’s history. One can answer “yes” or “no” to each of these questions. This checklist was developed based on the criteria for mania and hypomania according to the DSM-IV classification;

Limited to one question about whether the symptoms listed in the checklist appeared simultaneously;

Aimed at assessing the degree of social functioning disorder due to the symptoms listed in the first part.

The total MDQ score is obtained by summing the “yes” answers in the symptom checklist part (the maximum score is 13 points) [21–23].

A result indicating the characteristics of bipolar disorder in an adult is at least 7 “yes” answers to questions about (hypo)manic symptoms and the occurrence of at least two of these symptoms at the same period of life. The third criterion is the answer given in the third section of the questionnaire, indicating that the described symptoms created or create a moderate or serious problem for the patient [21, 24]. The questionnaire’s sensitivity and reliability are 73.4% and 89.9%, respectively. Some data suggest that lowering the threshold of this criterion and acknowledging that it is already fulfilled when the patient assesses the symptoms presented in the questionnaire as posing a minimal problem while increasing the threshold of positive responses to the questions from the first section to at least 8 increases the tool’s sensitivity. However, this matter requires confirmation through further research [25, 26].

The MDQ alone cannot be a screening tool for the general population, but its usefulness in the study of patients suffering from mental disorders (especially affective) is indisputably very high [27].

Translation of the Mood Disorder Questionnaire into the Polish was done at the Department of Adult Psychiatry, Medical University of Poznan, with the consent of Prof. Hirschfeld [27].