Replicability and generalizability of PTSD networks: A cross-cultural multisite study of PTSD symptoms in four trauma patient samples

The growing literature conceptualizing mental disorders like Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as networks of interacting symptoms faces three key challenges. Prior studies predominantly used (a) small samples with low power for precise estimation, (b) non-clinical samples, and (c) single samples. This renders network structures in clinical data, and the extent to which networks replicate across datasets, unknown. To overcome these limitations, the present cross-cultural multisite study estimated regularized partial correlation networks of 16 PTSD symptoms across four datasets of traumatized patients receiving treatment for PTSD (total N=2,782). Despite differences in culture, trauma-type and severity of the samples, considerable similarities emerged, with moderate to high correlations between symptom profiles (0.43-0.82), network structures (0.62-0.74), and centrality estimates (0.63-0.75). We discuss the importance of future replicability efforts to improve clinical psychological science, and provide code, model output, and correlation matrices to make the results of this paper fully reproducible.

随着将如创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）等心理疾病概念化为相互作用的症状网络的相关文献日益增多，该领域面临着三大核心挑战。既往研究主要存在以下问题：(a) 使用样本量小、统计效力不足，难以进行精确估计；(b) 样本非临床；(c) 单一样本。这导致临床数据中的网络结构以及网络在数据集间的复制程度不为人知。为克服这些局限性，本研究进行了一项跨文化多中心研究，对接受 PTSD 治疗的创伤患者（总计 N=2,782）的 16 项 PTSD 症状进行了正则化偏相关网络估计。尽管样本在文化、创伤类型和严重程度方面存在差异，但症状特征（0.43-0.82）、网络结构（0.62-0.74）和中心性估计（0.63-0.75）之间仍然展现出显著相似性。我们讨论了未来可重复性努力对于提升临床心理学科学的重要性，并提供代码、模型输出和相关矩阵，以确保本文结果的完全可重复性。