Table 2.
Prevalence of DSM-IV/CIDI disaster-related PTSD among respondents with randomly selected disasters by survey (n = 438)a
| % PTSD | (95% CI) | Number with PTSD (n1)b | Total sample size (n2)b | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I. High-income countries | ||||||
| Belgium | 0.5 | (0.0–1.7) | (1) | (7) | ||
| Italy | 3.8 | (0.0–11.2) | (1) | (35) | ||
| Northern Ireland | 0.5 | (0.0–1.5) | (1) | (23) | ||
| Spain | 0.1 | (0.0–0.2) | (1) | (14) | ||
| Spain – Murcia | 2.6 | (0.0–5.4) | (9) | (141) | ||
| United States | 3.4 | (0.0–8.0) | (3) | (158) | ||
| Total high | 2.8 | (0.5–5.1) | (16) | (378) | ||
| χ25c | 3.9 | p = 0.57 | ||||
| II. Middle- and low-income countries | ||||||
| Colombia | 0.5 | (0.0–1.5) | (1) | (21) | ||
| Mexico | 0.3 | (0.0–0.9) | (1) | (39) | ||
| Total low or middle | 0.4 | (0.0–0.9) | (2) | (60) | ||
| χ21c | 0.1 | p = 0.73 | ||||
| III. All countries | 2.5 | (0.5–4.4) | (18) | (438) | ||
| Overall between country difference − χ27c | 5.0 | p = 0.67 | ||||
| High v. low or middle difference − χ21c1 | 3.5 | p = 0.06 |
PTSD, Post-traumatic stress disorder; CI, confidence interval.
Each respondent who reported lifetime exposure to one or more traumatic experiences (TEs) had one occurrence of one such experience selected at random for detailed assessment. Each of these randomly selected TEs was weighted by the inverse of its probability of selection at the respondent level to create a weighted sample of TEs that was representative of all TEs in the population. The randomly selected disasters were the subset of these randomly selected TEs involving either natural or human-made disasters. The sum of weights of the randomly selected disasters was standardized within surveys to sum to the observed number of respondents whose randomly selected TE was a disaster. The n reported in the last column of this table represents that number of respondents. The results reported here are for the surveys where at least one respondent with a randomly selected disaster met DSM-IV/CIDI criteria for PTSD related to that TE. None of the respondents with randomly selected disasters in the other WMH surveys met criteria for disaster-related PTSD. These included 21 respondents in France 13 in Germany, 21 in Japan, 19 in Lebanon, 26 in Medellin, 11 in The Netherlands, 39 in Peru, 29 in Romania, 29 in South Africa, and 15 in Ukraine.
The reported sample sizes are unweighted. The unweighted proportions of respondents with PTSD do not match the prevalence estimates in the first column because the latter were based on weighted data.
The χ2 test with 5 degrees of freedom (df) in Part I of the table evaluated the significance of prevalence differences across the six high-income countries, while the 1 df test in Part II evaluated the prevalence difference between the two middle- and low-income countries. The two χ2 tests in Part III evaluated the significance of prevalence differences across all countries (the 7 df test) and between high- and middle-/low-income countries (the 1 df test). None of the tests are significant at the 0.05 level.