Use of the New York PTSD risk score to predict PTSD: current and future research efforts ☆

We appreciate Dr. Sonis’ comments related to our paper recently published in General Hospital Psychiatry [1,2]. As he suggests, the New York PTSD Risk Score we developed in that paper predicts current (i.e., incident and prevalent) PTSD status, and the Primary Care PTSD Screener (PCPS) is the strongest predictor of this status. He noted that although the increase in discrimination by adding psychosocial risk factors to the prediction results that included PCPS was statistically significant, the size of this increase was small. Dr. Sonis also pointed out that these findings suggest that a clinician who wants to screen for current PTSD would do well by simply using the PCPS, without the additional psychosocial variables we suggested. He further noted, correctly, that a clinical prediction model based on factors measured shortly after traumatic event exposure (but prior to the development of PTSD) that was capable of predicting PTSD at 12 months after exposure would be of more clinical utility since interventions designed to prevent PTSD could then be targeted among those at highest risk. Additionally, Dr. Sonis indicated that since peritraumatic factors that have been shown to predict PTSD development were not measured in our study, the NY PTSD Risk Score will not be useful to determine who is at higher risk of developing PTSD in the aftermath of trauma.