New rapid assessment tools for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were equal to or outperformed the diagnostic accuracy of standard PTSD tests, while also substantially reducing patient and clinician burden, according to study findings published online in JAMA Network Open.

“The results suggest that scalable, valid, and rapid PTSD diagnostic screening and severity measurement are possible,” wrote researchers from researchers at the Veterans Health Administration, Adaptive Testing Technologies, and the universities of Colorado, Pittsburgh, and  Chicago.

Conducted at a Veterans Affairs medical center, the study included 713 US military veterans and centered on the performance of 2 PTSD assessment tools: the Computerized Adaptive Diagnostic (CAD-PTSD) and the Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT-PTSD) measures. Some 304 of the participants were interviewed using the Clinician-Administered Scale for PTSD for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (CAPS-5).

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According to the study, the CAD-PTSD screener, with a maximum of just 6 items, reproduced the CAPS-5 PTSD diagnosis with outstanding diagnostic accuracy (researchers reported an area under the curve of 0.91) without the need for a trained clinician to administer it.

Meanwhile, the CAT-PTSD test, which measured the severity of PTSD symptoms using a mean of 10 adaptively administered items, actually outperformed the 20-item PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 in terms of diagnostic accuracy, researchers reported.

“Integration of these adaptive tests within electronic health record systems can facilitate routine diagnostic screening and symptom severity measurement for PTSD in usual clinical care. In many cases, to further reduce burden, conditional testing can be used in which the CAD-PTSD is administered first as a diagnostic screener and the CAT-PTSD is administered only for patients who have positive screening results…” researchers wrote.

“This will reduce median administration time to 35 seconds for most people, and 94 seconds for those with positive screening results.”

—Jolynn Tumolo

References

Brenner LA, Betthauser LM, Penzenik M, et al. Development and validation of computerized adaptive assessment tools for the measurement of posttraumatic stress disorder among US military veterans. JAMA Netw Open. 2021;4(7):e2115707. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.15707

Researchers from the Veterans Administration, academia, and Adaptive Testing Technologies develop and validate new rapid PTSD computerized adaptive assessment tools for U.S. military veterans. News release. Adaptive Testing Technologies. July 8, 2021. Accessed July 30, 2021.