Background: The vegetarian vegan eating disorder screener (V-EDS) is an 18-item self-report screening tool designed to assess the unique elements of eating disorder symptomology in vegetarians and vegans. Previous results have suggested strong initial psychometric properties in non-clinical community samples of vegetarians and vegans. The present study sought to identify a preliminary threshold cut-off score to discriminate eating disorder pathology in a self-reported clinical and community sample.
Methods: This study involved secondary analysis using data collected in McLean et al. (Development and preliminary validation of a novel eating disorder screening tool for vegetarians and vegans: the V-EDS, 2023), comprising 599 non-clinical participants and 51 self-reported clinical participants. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was used to compute possible cut-off values for the V-EDS.
Results: ROC analysis indicated good performance of the V-EDS (area under the curve = 0.87), with integration of the Youden index demonstrating a global score of ≥ 18 to be optimal in predicting clinical caseness with good sensitivity (0.804) and specificity (0.843).
Conclusions: The present study fills an important gap as the first to investigate an optimal V-EDS score to discriminate level of impairment from eating disorder pathology in a sample of vegetarian and vegan community and self-reported clinical participants. We extend the utility of the V-EDS in discovering good discrimination power in classifying clinical caseness with a cut-off score of 18 shown to optimise the trade-off between sensitivity and specificity. Future research should focus on expanding the psychometric properties of the V-EDS in larger and more diverse participant groups, including gender, age, cultural identity, and eating disorder history.
Keywords: Assessment; Cut-off score; Eating disorder; ROC curve analysis; V-EDS; Vegan; Vegetarian.
This study builds on the preliminary validation of a novel eating disorder screening tool for people adhering to a vegetarian and vegan diet called the V-EDS. In this study, we set out to develop a cut-off score for the V-EDS to distinguish people needing further evaluation for a possible eating disorder within the community. We found a global V-EDS score of ≥ 18 to be ideal in distinguishing between eating disorder symptomatic and non-eating disorder groups. In future, the V-EDS may prove useful for initial screening and symptom progression of eating disorders across both clinical and research settings.
© 2024. The Author(s).