Design and Interpretability of Findings in a Family Study to Investigate Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Letter to the Editor

Sir: The study by Dierker and Merikangas (September 2001 issue) contained many shortcomings that make the results difficult to place within the growing body of literature about associations between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychiatric disorders. A lack of standardization in study design, from the selection and categorization of the sample to data-gathering methods, renders this study difficult to comprehend.