PTSD symptomics: network analyses in the field of psychotraumatology

Abstract

Recent years have seen increasing attention on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) research. While research has largely focused on the dichotomy between patients diagnosed with mental disorders and healthy controls — in other words, investigations at the level of diagnoses — recent work has focused on psychopathology symptoms. Symptomics research in the area of PTSD has been scarce so far, although several studies have focused on investigating the network structures of PTSD symptoms. The present special issue of EJPT adds to the literature by curating additional PTSD network studies, each looking at a different aspect of PTSD. We hope that this special issue encourages researchers to conceptualize and model PTSD data from a network perspective, which arguably has the potential to inform and improve the efficacy of therapeutic interventions.

A decennial review of psychotraumatology: what did we learn and where are we going?

“…What we do not know is how the neurobiological (Lanius & Olff, 2017), psychological (Baekkelund, Frewen, Lanius, Ottesen Berg, & Arnevik, 2018;Schafer, Becker, King, Horsch, & Michael, 2019), affective (Strøm, Aakvaag, Birkeland, Felix, & Thoresen, 2018), and relational (Heeke, Kampisiou, Niemeyer, & Knaevelsrud, 2019;van Dijke, Hopman, & Ford, 2018) alterations associated with different forms, durations, and structures (Armour, Fried, & Olff, 2017;Murphy, Elklit, Dokkedahl, & Shevlin, 2018) of psychotrauma exposure (and reexposure) emerge and take different courses or trajectories across the lifespanand across generations (Burnette & Cannon, 2014;Crombach & Bambonye, 2015;Schick, Morina, Klaghofer, Schnyder, & Muller, 2013). Biopsychosocial mechanisms and processes involved in the long-term adverse impact of childhood trauma over decades into mid-life and old age (Glück, Knefel, Tran, & Lueger-Schuster, 2016) and across generations (Kuffer, Thoma, & Maercker, 2016) have been preliminarily conceptualized but remain understudied.…”

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms and Reckless Behaviors: A Network Analysis Approach

“…Such important questions can be addressed using the network analytic approach to psychopathology (Armour, Fried, & Olff, 2017). A network consists of nodes that represent individual variables (i.e., symptoms or constructs), and these are con-nected by edges representing the strength of the associations between variables (Borsboom & Cramer, 2013).…”

Diagnostic Issues of Depressive Disorders from Kraepelinian Dualism to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition

“…Symptomics methods are used to analyze the potential causal interrelations among symptom networks and to understand psychopathology at the level of the individual, not the diagnosis. 40,41 Based on the symptomics framework, psychiatric diagnoses are considered collections of interrelated symptoms or symptom clusters; network analysis is then used to explore the map of connections and eventual dynamic influences among symptoms and other elements including risk factors, biomarkers, and treatment responses in the field of mental disorders. [42][43][44][45] Network analysis is also used to evaluate the properties of the network as a whole and to determine whether or not these properties contribute to adaptive functioning within the network.…”