Abstract
BackgroundAbout twice as many women as men develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even though men as a group are exposed to more traumatic events. Exposure to different trauma types does not sufficiently explain why women are more vulnerable.MethodsThe present work examines the effect of age, previous trauma, negative affectivity (NA), anxiety, depression, persistent dissociation, and social support on PTSD separately in men and women. Subjects were exposed to either a series of explosions in a firework factory near a residential area or to a high school stabbing incident.ResultsSome gender differences were found in the predictive power of well known risk factors for PTSD. Anxiety predicted PTSD in men, but not in women, whereas the opposite was found for depression. Dissociation was a better predictor for PTSD in women than in men in the explosion sample but not in the stabbing sample. Initially, NA predicted PTSD better in women than men in the explosion sample, but when compared only to other significant risk factors, it significantly predicted PTSD for both men and women in both studies. Previous traumatic events and age did not significantly predict PTSD in either gender.ConclusionGender differences in the predictive value of social support on PTSD appear to be very complex, and no clear conclusions can be made based on the two studies included in this article.
Highlights
About twice as many women as men develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even though men as a group are exposed to more traumatic events
Though this result is in contrast to our hypothesis, it is consistent with the finding in the Bromet et al [13] study mentioned earlier, that the relationship between age and PTSD in women lost significance when trauma type was controlled for, as the two samples included in this study focused on just one trauma type each
For negative affectivity (NA), there was an initial gender difference in the explosion sample, but in the final analyses, NA significantly predicted PTSD in both men and women from both samples, which was contrary to our expectations
Summary
About twice as many women as men develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even though men as a group are exposed to more traumatic events. It is a well established fact that women develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) more often than men do [13] despite the fact that men experience up to four times as many potentially traumatic events during their lifetime [3]. Saxe et al [8] studied child burn victims and found that there are two separate pathways leading to PTSD: an anxiety pathway and a dissociation pathway [8]. These two pathways are separated by different risk factors, suggesting that different biobehavioural systems contribute to PTSD. Another study focusing on sexually abused children revealed the existence of an avoidance pathway, which was more pronounced in boys than in girls [9]
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