Assessment of older combat veterans with the clinician‐administered PTSD scale

Abstract

Abstract A study of the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among older combat veterans of World War II and the Korean Conflict was conducted. The Clinician‐Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) was given to 125 older combat veterans, along with a computerized variant of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM‐III‐R for PTSD, the SCID‐DTREE. (The SCID‐DTREE was itself validated against the full SCID). Results showed the CAPS to be a good discriminator of PTSD: Out of the 125 cases, only 9 were misclassified using the SCID‐DTREE as the base measure, a 93% efficiency. An alpha on the full CAPS was 95. This suggests that the CAPS is an appropriate scale for use with older combat veterans.