Epidemiology and genetics of trauma and posttraumatic stress outcomes in electronic health records

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the sentinel psychiatric disorder following traumatic events and is highly debilitating.

The large-scale nature of electronic health records offers a new opportunity to characterize the real-world prevalence of trauma, PTSD, and other post-traumatic stress outcomes in health systems and identify their epidemiological and genetic correlates.

This proposal aims to coordinate the PsycheMERGE sites around defining PTSD-related phenotypes and trauma exposure in the US health systems, examining their epidemiological correlates across these health systems, and also conducting genetic analyses of these PTSD phenotypes, trauma exposure, and other post-traumatic stress outcomes using GWAS and PRS analyses.

Where relevant, we will also partner with the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium PTSD Working Group on these efforts and to contribute these GWAS summary statistics for meta-analyses.

This collaborative work will pave the way for further efforts to investigate and predict post-traumatic outcomes with EHRs.