Does Evidence-Based PTS Treatment Reduce PTS Symptoms and Suicide in Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Seeking VA Care
Abstract
We identified a cohort of OEF/OIF/OND Veterans who had a diagnosis of PTS after the end oftheir last deployment (N=308,556). This PTS cohort had a mean age of 35.9 years (SD=8.8years), was 89.6 male, and was comprised of those who were 57.5 white, 13.9 black, 11.4 Hispanic, 3.9 other and 13.9 unknown. We identified 5.7 million psychotherapy visits madeby these Veterans in the study period and linked these to approximately 8 millionpsychotherapy notes. We completed a standardized annotation guide specifying each category ofpsychotherapy to be identified and then four study team members annotated a set of 650 notes.We used a bag of words and support vector machine (SVM) approach to generate a classifier for irrelevant notes, which had a classification accuracy of 88 . This allowed us to removeirrelevant documents and generate an enriched pool of 4 million psychotherapy notes to beused for ongoing rounds of annotation. Also during this period, we identified 30,884 (10) Veterans in our PTS cohort with three (or more) PCLs within an 18 week period, and,separately, 101,761 (33 of PTS cohort) members of the PTS cohort with two or more suicide screenings during the post-deployment period.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 01, 2016
- Accession Number
- AD1016372
Entities
People
- Erin Madden
- Shira Maguen
Organizations
- Northern California Institute for Research and Education