Prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder in students 23 months after tsunami.

OBJECTIVE: To study the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the 4th-9th grade students in an affected school 23 months after tsunami. METHOD: Two-stage screening procedure was used in a diagnostic study designed to identify post-traumatic stress disorder in the 4th-9th grade students in a school in Takaupa district, Phang Nga province, 23 months after the 2004 tsunami. Impact of Events Scale (IES) was used as a screening questionnaire in the first stage. In the second stage, the students were assessed by a psychiatrist to identify PTSD according to DSM-IV criteria. SPSS 10.0, inferential statistics and Chi-square test were used to analyze the data. RESULT: A total of 436 students participated in the study. Forty of them were diagnosed with PTSD. The prevalence of PTSD was 15.1%. The sensitivity, specificity and negative predictive value of IES were 0.75, 0.54 and 0.92 respectively. CONCLUSION: The prevalence of PTSD in students in a school 23 months after tsunami was 15.1%.