2-ASAP: Improving early risk detection and indicated prevention for PTSD

Clip-art image of a doctor pointing at PTSD trajectories with foggy or less foggy brain images

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a serious mental health condition that affects a substantial number of people exposed to traumatic events. Early detection and timely intervention are crucial to prevent the development of long-term PTSD symptoms. However, current diagnostic methods often fail to identify high-risk individuals in the initial weeks after trauma, leading to delayed or missed opportunities for effective care.

The Towards Accurate Screening And Prevention (2-ASAP) consortium aims to develop a new screening instrument that can accurately assess the risk of individuals developing long-term posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when applied soon after a traumatic event, and to precisely target preventative interventions towards individuals recognized to be at risk. This new instrument aims to overcome the limitations of existing screening tools by incorporating machine learning techniques.

Progress

The 2-ASAP consortium project started in 2020, runs for eight years and contains multiple projects. In this specific project, the 2-ASAP consortium and the DISC-AI Lab collaborate to conduct a systematic scoping review of existing prognostic risk screening instruments for PTSD using ASReview. The purpose of this review is to get a comprehensive overview of available screening instruments and to identify common elements in the most accurate tools for classifying individuals at risk for PTSD.

This project is also closely connected to part of the FORAS project, which focuses on developing an open-source and continuously updatable pipeline for systematic reviews. The FORAS team is working on overcoming key biases in the systematic reviewing process, such as the overrepresentation of English-language studies from Western countries and the reliance on closed-access academic databases. The development of this pipeline is essential to ensure that PTSD screening tools are validated on a globally representative set of studies, reducing bias and improving applicability across diverse populations. More about this systematic reviewing pipeline can be found under 鈥淭he Hunt for the Last Relevant Paper鈥 on the FORAS project page.

Funding

The 2-ASAP project is funded by ZonMw under project nr. 636340004. The part of this project that is related to FORAS is funded by NWO under project nr. 406.22.GO.048.

People involved

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