May 3, 2011 09:17 GMT  ·  By
Servicemen with a mental health history are 5 times more likely to develop PTSD than their peers
   Servicemen with a mental health history are 5 times more likely to develop PTSD than their peers

A large-scale survey of people serving in the United States military has revealed that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a condition about five times more likely to affect servicemen with a mental health history than individuals who never experienced such problems.

It was made clear that soldiers who were injured during past deployments were more likely to develop PTSD in new missions. In other words, being wounded in the line of duty creates a risk factor that could lead to the development of this mental disorder.

The team that conducted the work got access to the US Army Institute of Surgical Research's Joint Theater Trauma Registry (JTTR). Additional data were collected from the Navy–Marine Corps Combat Trauma Registry Expeditionary Medical Encounter Database (CTR EMED).

Participants in the survey were selected from all branches of the military, including the Army, Air Force, Navy, National Guard and the Reserves. A total of 22,630 U.S. service members were analyzed.

All test subjects had to fill out a questionnaire containing the PTSD test before deploying in a mission, and again upon return. Experts then compared the before and after tests, and teased out the factors that may have led to the development of PTSD in individuals who were diagnosed with the condition.

“The relationship between preinjury psychiatric status and postinjury PTSD is not well-understood because studies have used retrospective methods,” the authors of the study explain, quoted by PsychCentral.

“The primary objective of our study was to prospectively assess the relationship of self-reported preinjury psychiatric status and injury severity with PTSD among those deployed in support of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” they add.

In the research paper accompanying their study – published in the May issue of the journal Archives of General Psychiatry – they explain that past psychiatric diagnostics were a much more concrete predictive factor for the development of PTSD than past injuries received on the battlefield.

According to the researchers, one possible way the US military could go about reducing the incidence of PTSD among servicemen would be to set in place better pre-deployment screening procedures.

This “might be useful to identify a combination of characteristics of deployed military personnel that could predict those most vulnerable or, conversely, those most resilient to post-deployment PTSD, thereby providing an opportunity for the development of pre-deployment interventions that may mitigate post-deployment mental health morbidity,” the team concludes.