Return to Main Menu

Center director pleased with WTC study When the New York Academy of Medicine sought to determine how attacks on the World Trade Center effected the mental health of Manhattan residents, they called on MUSC’s National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center (NCVC).   The resulting collaboration is one that center director Dean Kilpatrick, Ph.D. and his crime victims center colleague, Heidi Resnick, Ph.D., have found satisfying, one that affirms the NCVC position as an internationally recognized authority in post traumatic stress disorder and depression.   “It’s gratifying to us—an honor, really—to know that when they were looking for a collaborating institution, they turned to us,” Kilpatrick said. “It speaks well for MUSC’s reputation.”   The study, which was funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and included New York-based survey research firm Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas Inc., assessed post traumatic stress disorder and depression among Manhattan residents five to eight weeks after the attacks.    The researchers randomly selected adults who lived in Manhattan at the time of the study. Participants were interviewed by telephone and asked questions about their exposure to Sept. 11 events and whether they experienced psychological problems after the attacks. The participants were also asked about their level of emotional support during the six months prior to the attacks and the number of stressful events they experienced during the year before the attacks.   Findings of the study were published in the March 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.   The team, led by New York Academy of Medicine’s David Vlahov, Ph.D., and Sandro Galea, M.D., P.H.D., found that 7.5 percent of the study’s 1,008 participants reported symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder and 9.7 percent reported symptoms of depression. More than 3 percent of participants reported symptoms of both the stress disorder and depression.    The New York findings are two to three times higher than the PTSD and depression rates reported by participants in a national mental health study conducted in the early 1990s.   “The question we were trying to answer was, who is likely to be most affected by post-traumatic stress? It’s of great value for mental health treatment,” Kilpatrick told The State newspaper in a March 28 report. The study found such factors as property and job loss, directly witnessing the events, and having a friend or relative killed increased people’s chances of having lingering problems.    Also, the researchers found that people who were so scared that they had a panic attack during the disaster were more likely to have mental health problems.   That sort of information, Kilpatrick said, is useful in helping mental health professionals treat survivors of future disasters and other traumatic events.    Kilpatrick and Resnick will continue the center’s collaboration with the academy as they expand the longitudinal study to include New York City and later the greater metropolitan New York area.   “Everybody in the field understands how difficult it is to do good research in the chaos of large-scale disasters,” Kilpatrick said, reserving only high praise for the New York researchers he and Resnick worked with. “They’re smart; they work fast. I’m glad that our knowledge of traumatic events and how to deal with them helped our colleagues in New York do a really excellent study.”