Screening for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Symptom-based self-rating measures were established to detect individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after specific traumatic events. The aim of the present study was to compare the diagnostic efficiency of the German version of the Trauma Screening Questionnaire (TSQ), the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (PDS), and an 8-item subset of the PDS. Receiver-operating-characteristic analyses are determined in a treatment- seeking outpatient sample (N = 208) with mixed trauma type. The areas under the curve (AUC) for all measures were found to be moderate (AUC = 0.77- 0.81); hence, measures did not differ in terms of their discriminatory abilities. Using the favored cutoff points, sensitivity (53- 81%) and specificity (71- 84%) values were at a level that was only moderate. Considering the high economic burden due to PTSD and the moderate specificity values, a two-stage screening approach might result in only moderate cost-efficiency for treatment-seeking outpatients. In addition, our results support the notion that discriminatory abilities and operating characteristics based on samples with a specific trauma type have to be cross-validated.