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PTSD Scale Prevalance and Trends
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition. Rapid accurate assessment facilitates the timely diagnosis and early intervention in PTSD. With the development of modern medicine, a large number of instruments are developed and applied in scientific research and clinical applications. However, choosing the appropriate instrument for a PTSD study is not easy due to lack of enough comprehensively comparison and evaluation. The objective of the present study is to investigate the usage prevalence and temporal trends of assessment instruments in the field of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by analyzing broad text data, including real clinical trials from Clinicaltrials.gov and published articles from PubMed. We aims to calculated and visualized the prevalence index of instruments while considering the assessment target, and reveal the knowledge and trends. We believe the prevalence of instruments is one of the important indexes in measurement selection, and the knowledge can contribute to study or trial design as reference.
About
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that’s triggered by a terrifying traumatic event either experiencing it or witnessing it. Rapid accurate assessment facilitates the timely diagnosis and early intervention in PTSD. With the development of modern medicine, a large number of instruments are developed and applied in scientific research and clinical applications. However, choosing the appropriate instrument for a PTSD study is not easy due to lack of enough comprehensively comparison and evaluation.
Recently, text mining becomes increasingly promising for biomedical research, especially in fields of public health and biomedical informatics. In this study, we tried to comprehensively investigate the prevalence trends of almost all instruments using broad text data from real clinical trials from Clinicaltrials.gov and published articles from PubMed of PTSD. A total of 1345 real clinical trials from ClinicalTrials.gov and 9422 abstracts from PubMed database from year 2005 to 2020 were collected. The instruments applied in clinical trials were manually annotated, and instruments in abstracts were recognized with exact string matching. After calculated and visualized yearly prevalence index for each instrument, we conducted trends analysis and compared the index change trends between instruments.
Prevalence
The prevalence of an instrument is measured by its usage frequency, which is calculated as the total number of studies in a given period divided by the number of times an instrument is used in that period, which is defined below:
\[prevalence\ index = \frac{the\ number\ of\ times\ an\ instrument\ was\ used\ in\ a\ given\ period}{the\ total\ number\ of\ studies\ in\ that\ period}\]
In this study, the prevalence index for each instrument was calculated for each year.
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There are totally 1423 instruments annotated, which can be found here, including original used name, normalized name, and abbreviation. The abbreviation contains two level, level1 is only abbreviated names, level2 is abbreviated names with special version information. For example, for a original used name "PTSD Check List-Military (PCL-M)", it's level2 normalized name is "PTSD CheckList - Military Version", with a level2 abbreviation "PCL-M", it's level1 normalized name is "PTSD Checklist", with a level1 abbreviation "PCL".
A total of 1345 clinical trials were collected and annotated instruments, which can be found here.