Correction: Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric validation of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment-7 for Urdu-speaking clinical populations

In response to the reservations raised by the Authors of “Urdu translation and validation of GAD-7: a screening and rating tool for anxiety symptoms in primary health care” (J Pak Med Assoc 2017;67:1536-40), the Authors of the paper “Cross cultural adaptation and psychometric validation of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment-7 for Urdu-speaking clinical populations”, published as an Early access on June 4^th, 2026, on Healthcare in Low-resource Settings, in accordance with Ahmad et al., the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, and the Publisher, wish to rephrase the initial paragraph of the Discussion section of their paper, in order to better reflect the work and the contribution of Ahmad et al.

The rephrased paragraph will be as follows:

The present study is the first comprehensive effort to linguistically translate and psychometrically validate the GAD-7 for clinical use in Pakistan. Despite its widespread international use, the scale has undergone limited cross-cultural validation in the country; prior translations, e.g., Ahmad et al.⁷ previously conducted a structured Urdu translation and psychometric validation of the GAD-7, reporting exploratory factor analytic evidence, reliability estimates, and convergent and discriminant validity findings. Nevertheless, additional contemporary psychometric evidence testing remained limited, warranting further validation research. The present study sought to further extend previously conducted research by adopting a broader contemporary validation framework and to provide additional evidence regarding the cultural and psychometric performance of the Urdu GAD-7. Specifically, the present study incorporated a multidisciplinary evaluation panel, explicit evaluation of semantic, conceptual, and cultural equivalence, item-level review and refinement, consideration of culturally specific idioms of distress, and detailed documentation of adaptation decisions. In addition, the study extended psychometric evaluation through confirmatory factor analysis, measurement invariance testing, and ROC-based diagnostic accuracy analysis. Accordingly, the present study should be understood as building upon and extending the work of Ahmad et al.,⁷ rather than replacing it.

The definitive version of record of the paper will bear the rephrased paragraph.

The paragraph originally featured in the Early access read:

The present study is the first comprehensive effort to linguistically translate and psychometrically validate the GAD-7 for clinical use in Pakistan. Despite its widespread international use, the scale has undergone limited cross-cultural validation in the country; prior translations, e.g., Ahmad et al.⁷ have not systematically examined its psychometric properties. This study addresses this gap by providing a cultural adaption alongside rigorous psychometric validation in a Pakistani clinical population.

References

Ahmad S, Hussain S, Shah FS, Akhtar F. Urdu translation and validation of GAD-7: a screening and rating tool for anxiety symptoms in primary health care. J Pak Med Assoc 2017;67:1536-40.

Khan A, Madihie A, Ali I. Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric validation of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment-7 for Urdu-speaking clinical populations. Healthc Low-resour S doi: 10.4081/hls.2026.14309