Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Physically Injured Patients after Motor Vehicle Accidents

Kim, Tae Hyoeng; Kim, Yim; Yi, Sun Mi; Eun, Hun Jeong; Kim, Dong in; Kwang, Young Soo

Abstract

OBJECTIVES
The authors attempted to estimate the incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the differences of sociodemographical features, injury severity, depression and anxiety between PTSD and non-PTSD groups artier motor vehicle accident.
METHODS
The subjects were 104 patients who had undergone motor vehicle accidents, and been hospitalized to orthopedic surgery hospitals. We administered them clinician-administered PTSD scale(CAPS) for diagnosing PTSD, injury severity scale(ISS) for identifying their physical injury, self-reported questionnaire made to identify socioepidmogrphic data, Beck Depression Inventory(BDI) for measuring depression, and State Trait Anxiety Inventory I, II(STAI- I, II)for measuring anxiety.
RESULTS
The incidence of PTSD in subjects was 61.5%. Most of sociodemogrphic factors were not different between PTSD and non-PTSD groups. Only there were signigicant differences between PTSD group and non-PTSD group on the cases that observed the dead or the wounded at the scene of motor vehicle accident( chi2=8.478, p<0.05) and BDI(t=5.03, p<0.05).
CONCLUSION
These results indicate that prevalence of PTSD is higher after motor vehicle accident and both of the two groups report much higher depression and anxiety than normal population. In addition, the results of this study show that the observation of dead or wounded at accident situation can be of risk factors to precipitatae PTSD.