[Validation of the brief Bite's symptoms scale for screening of the bulimia nervosa in university students]. / Validación de la escala breve de síntomas del BITE para el tamizaje de Bulimia Nerviosa en estudiantes universitarios.

INTRODUCTION: Prevalence of the Bulimia Nervosa and eating disorder bulimic-like have increased in the last years. It has created the necessity of instruments for early detection on high risk populations. OBJECTIVE: Validity and internal consistency of the brief BITE's symptoms scale in a non-clinical population of university students in Colombia. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We took a sample probabilistic and representative of 261 university students from Bucaramanga. They full out the BITE's symptoms scale. The fifteen items with the higher correlation with total score were selected. Construct and criterion validity were computed for these fifteen items. RESULTS: Internal consistency of brief version was of 0.84. There were three factors that explained 49.2% of the variance. Significant difference among the area under the curve ROC between the original version (0.9736) and the brief version (0.9608) was not observed. The best cutoff point was 5 with sensibility of 91.9%, specificity of 82.6% and the Cohen's kappa of 0.53. CONCLUSION: The brief BITE's symptoms scale shows psychometrics properties similar to the original version allowing the use like screening instrument in university students.