Network Analysis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms in a National Sample of U.S. Adults: Implications for the Phenotype and the ICD-11 Model of PTSD.

The phenotype for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases (DSM-5) includes 20 symptoms in four clusters. In contrast, the PTSD model in the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) includes six symptoms in three clusters. Whether those six symptoms are, in fact, the most central symptoms of the PTSD phenotype remains an open question. In a previous network analysis of DSM-5 PTSD symptoms, Mitchell and colleagues (2017) reported limited overlap between central PTSD symptoms and those in the ICD-11 model in a national sample of U.S. veterans. The present study sought to replicate and extend upon these findings in a large national sample of U.S. adults (N = 2,953). Centrality statistics from both a replication sample (i.e., participants with DSM-5 PTSD, n = 173) and an extension sample (i.e., participants who had been exposed to potentially traumatic events, n = 2,468) were moderately strongly convergent with the findings reported by Mitchell et al., rs = .54-.73. Additionally, only three of the six most central symptoms in both the replication and extension samples overlapped with the ICD-11 model, indicating that the ICD-11 model (a) failed to include network-central symptoms of the PTSD phenotype and (b) included extra symptoms that were not network-central. Several symptoms from the DSM-5 Criterion D cluster (negative alterations in cognition and mood) that were excluded in ICD-11 were found to be among the most central PTSD symptoms.