Effects of varying scoring rules of the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) for the diagnosis of PTSD after acute burn injury

The Clinician Administered Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Scale (CAPS) enables quantification of the seventy of each of the 17 posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Blanchard and colleagues (1995) have documented variation in rates of PTSD among survivors of motor vehicle accidents depending on the CAPS scoring rule used. This report examines the effects of varying the scoring rules of the CAPS on rates of acute PTSD symptoms in hospitalized burn patients. Changing from the most liberal to the most conservative scoring rule resulted in a change in diagnosis of acute PTSD from 25% to 32% of the sample. The variation documented in this study and others has implications for a range of issues, including rates of PTSD in epidemiological studies, treatment outcome research, and forensic evaluations.