The impact of post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology on quality of life: The sentinel experience of anger, hypervigilance and restricted affect:

Background:It is unclear which specific symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are related to poor perceived quality of life.Objective:To investigate the influence of post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology on quality of life in traumatic injury survivors.Method:Traumatic injury survivors completed questionnaires on post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology and quality of life at 3 months (n = 987), 12 months (n = 862), 24 months (n = 830) and 6 years (n = 613) post trauma.Results:Low quality of life was reported by 14.5% of injury survivors at 3 months and 8% at 6 years post event. The post-traumatic stress disorder symptom clusters that contributed most to poor perceived quality of life were numbing and arousal, the individual symptoms that contributed most were anger, hypervigilance and restricted affect.Conclusions:There was variability in the quality of life of traumatic injury survivors in the 6 years following trauma and a consistent proportion reported low quality of life. Early inte...