Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

The Impact of Event Scale – Revised: Examining its cutoff scores among Arab psychiatric patients and healthy adults within the context of COVID-19 as a collective traumatic event

Version 1 : Received: 14 January 2023 / Approved: 25 January 2023 / Online: 25 January 2023 (05:02:13 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Ali, A.M.; Al-Dossary, S.A.; Almarwani, A.M.; Atout, M.; Al-Amer, R.; Alkhamees, A.A. The Impact of Event Scale-Revised: Examining Its Cutoff Scores among Arab Psychiatric Patients and Healthy Adults within the Context of COVID-19 as a Collective Traumatic Event. Healthcare 2023, 11, 892. Ali, A.M.; Al-Dossary, S.A.; Almarwani, A.M.; Atout, M.; Al-Amer, R.; Alkhamees, A.A. The Impact of Event Scale-Revised: Examining Its Cutoff Scores among Arab Psychiatric Patients and Healthy Adults within the Context of COVID-19 as a Collective Traumatic Event. Healthcare 2023, 11, 892.

Abstract

The Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) is the most popular measure of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which has been recently validated in Arabic. This instrumental study aimed to determine optimal cutoff scores of the IES-R and its subscales in Arab samples of psychiatric patients (N = 168, 70.8% females) and healthy adults (N = 992, 62.7% females) from Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 pandemic as an ongoing collective traumatic event. Based on a cutoff score of 14 of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale 8-items (DASS-8), receiver operator curve (ROC) analysis revealed two optimal points of 39.5 and 30.5 for the IES-R in the samples (area under the curve (AUC) = 0.86 & 0.91, p values = 0.001, 95% CI: 0.80-0.92 & 0.87 to 0.94, sensitivity = 0.85 & 0.87, specificity = 0.73 & 0.83, Youden index = 0.58 & 0.70, respectively). Different cutoffs were detected for the six subscales of the IES-R, with numbing and avoidance expressing the lowest predictivity for distress. Meanwhile, hyperarousal followed by the irritability expressed stronger predictive capacity for distress than all subscales in both samples. In path analysis, pandemic-related irritability resulted from direct and indirect effects of key PTSD symptoms (intrusion, hyperarousal, and numbing). Irritability contributed to traumatic symptoms of sleep disturbance in both samples while the opposite was not true. The findings suggest usefulness of the IES-R at a score of 30.5 for detecting adults prone to trauma related distress, with higher scores needed for screening in psychiatric patients. Various PTSD symptoms may induce dysphoric mood, which represents a considerable burden that may induce circadian misalignment and more noxious psychiatric problems/ co-morbidities (sleep disturbance) in both healthy and diseased groups.

Keywords

Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R)/post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); cutoff point/cutoff score; psychiatric patients/the general public/healthy adults; psychometric evaluation/criterion validity; Coronavirus Disease-19/COVID-19; Arabic version/Arab/Saudi Arabia

Subject

Social Sciences, Psychology

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