Diagnosing eating disorders in adolescents: A comparison of the eating disorder examination and the development and well-being assessment

Objective: To compare the diagnostic properties of the Eating Disorder Examination (EDE) and the online version of the Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA). Method: Fifty-Seven adolescents (mean age 15.7 years) who attended consecutive assessments at a specialist eating disorders clinic completed the DAWBA, the EDE, and a standard clinical assessment with a multidisciplinary team. Cohen's Kappas were used to make pairwise comparisons between the diagnoses generated by the three assessments. Results: Participants had anorexia nervosa (n = 30), eating disorders NOS (n = 21) or no eating disorder (n = 6) according to the clinical diagnosis. Agreement between the clinical and DAWBA diagnoses was moderate (κ = 0.59), agreement between the DAWBA and EDE diagnoses was fair (κ = 0.21), and agreement between the clinical and EDE diagnoses was poor (κ = 0.10). The EDE did not identify an eating disorder in 20 participants (35% of the sample) who were clinically assessed as cases. Conclusion: Computerized measures using multiple informants may be more suitable for assessing clinical samples of adolescents with anorexia nervosa or eating disorders NOS than individual interviews with young people.